I'm not a huge 4X guy but have a flirtation with them from time to time and I gotta say that Age of Wonders 4 has really got me supremely hooked.

There's not a lot of mainstream coverage of the game; what do fans or newcomers to 4X think?

I'm finding it a real mixed bag. City development is in a good place, the tactical combat is as good as ever, and different culture/tome combos feel sufficiently different, but I'm finding the whole thing completely charmless. It's an easy enough problem to ignore in the early game where the brisk pace can cover for it, but once things slow down a bit, I find myself remembering that this just isn't a nice place to be, which tires me out and pushes me away -- compare the sterile landscapes of AoW4 to the beautiful and properly fantastical visuals of AoW2 (this problem is a holdover from AoW3, which reminded me of the rough transition-to-3D suffered by the similar Heroes of Might and Magic series). The pantheon is a major regression from Planetfall's Galactic Empire mode, and the game is peppered with UI/UX shortcomings and minor bugs that pull me out of it. There's some solid meat and potatoes in there, but they're all tossed into a mushy, flavorless stew.

It was either somewhere around AoW3 or Planetfall where the series stopped being compared to HoMM in favor of being compared to Civilization, which I don't think is entirely fair, but right now AoW is maybe trying to have its cake and eat it too, with mixed results. There's a lot of fancy tinsel in the margins of a game that is ultimately about having a big enough army to win. At this point I think the series would benefit from picking a lane -- personally I wouldn't mind leaning more into a Stellaris-like direction, which would sacrifice mechanical purity and symmetric gameplay in favor of systems that help foster emergent narratives, and keep that early-game excitement active into the later turns, which presently tend to converge on throwing stacks of armies at each other while the victory countdown progresses.

It looked great to me, but I figured I should maybe actually give 3 a shot first which has been sitting in my Steam account since launch 😬

I was completely obsessed with Shadow Magic twenty years ago. And I later discovered AOW1 and was charmed by the late-DOS aesthetics.

Haha one of the first projects I did in games was the print strategy guide for Shadow Magic! We had basically no resources from the developer so I had to send in zoomed-in screenshots of the minimap for the walkthrough.