Quick Look: Age of Wonders: Planetfall

The audio seems broken?

@nkornek: What are you hearing? It all sounds fine to me.

I love planetside

Audio is ok for me.

Audio seems fine to me.

I'm in the middle of pulling some more words together, but my quick take on Planetfall is that the tactical combat and unit modding is great, but the strategic layer rings hollow. Of the 4Xs out there, it probably lives closes to Endless Legend, which I would say has a much stronger strategic layer but totally flubs the aforementioned combat and unit management.

Sounds great to me.

@peezmachine: I actually find the strategy in Planetfall to be surprisingly deep. Since annexations, forward bases and colonies can only be built in central sectors, there's a lot of consideration to "can I cut off my opponent's power-producing sectors and deny them income to produce units, or should I capture their research sector and overwhelm them through superior tech? Has the opponent built defensive fortifications in this sector or are they relying on basic militia? Does this sector have any major landmarks? Since roads can only be built between connected sectors, can I capture this area and deny my opponent the opportunity to quickly move their armies?"

The much-more developed Diplomacy system provides you with quite a few strategic considerations, as well. Since a declaration of war without sufficient casusbelli provides your population with a *huge* morale penalty, a manipulative leader can use that to their advantage - expanding territory in the path of where your opponent wants to go means that every time they trespass in your territory, you gain casus belli that justifies hostilities. Other leaders being to passive? Use your Covert Ops agents to "falsify evidence" against a select opponent, which will give you significant casus belli to attack them.

Strategy in unit customization is critical, also. Outfitting your troops with Psionic weapons is going to be pointless against the cyber-zombies of The Assembly, but Arc-weapons will easily short-circuit their systems. If you're facing the genetically-altered animals and warriors of the Amazons, Arc-weapons won't do much, but Psionic weapons can break the will of biological units (and so on).

As with most 4X games, I'm totally interested, but would rather wait and jump in when the inevitable DLC comes out that makes it a more complete experience.

There's something I can't specifically place about this game's UI that I can't get past. It could be the softer blues and reds, the floaty text boxes, something.

@peezmachine: I’ve always thought of Age of Wonders as sitting in a middle ground between the pace of a more traditional 4X and something a little more straightforwardly war game-ish like Heroes of Might and Magic. Regardless of what victory condition you’re going for, you’re going to want to have a strong military and expand aggressively. That limits and focuses the strategic considerations a bit, but it also means you can’t play nearly as passively as something like Civ, which I appreciate as someone who will totally just turtle every time I play Civ.

As someone who loved Age of Wonders III, I’ve been liking this one a lot thus far. They’ve made a lot of smart, interesting changes (having a limited resource with a mostly fixed income to keep you from just spamming nothing but ultimate-tier units late game) and I’m hopeful for the same level of post-release support as AoW 3 to make it even better.

I jumped into this one on release and once I crested the early learning curve (spike?) things have been pretty satisfying....

Sounds fine on laptop and speaker system.

Nice. Glad they're playing a 4x game since they don't get featured much. Gonna watch this now.

Been playing this for a few hours. Campaign on the boring side and overwhelming with objectives, so I started a custom scenario, which is way more relaxing.

Eta- if your armies are adjacent to each other when you attack/ed, both squads show up in the battle. Much easier having 12 units against the enemy.

This video, like almost every video coming from the East coast for awhile now, is extremely quiet in comparison to West coast content.

Is this what I wanted Civ Beyond Earth to be?

If it is sign me up

@dasakamov: I find that unless I am taking a super diplomatic approach and building accordingly, I'll end up the target of multiple wars, at which point the only strategic option is to turtle up and wait either for my Tier 4s or for a third party to provide me an opening. I find this leads to me only committing to a fight when I have overwhelming force, as it's more cost-effective to show up overprepared than it is to win a Pyrrhic victory. This in turn means I don't get as much time in tactical combat with my hand-crafted units (and yes, I concur that the mod system is fantastic), as I'm not going to micro-manage a blowout. Hopefully some of this will iron out as I play more (despite being with the AoW series since the jump, I still feel like I'm just sort of average at it), but right now I wish the strategic layer felt more interactive between players. Also I feel like city development is full of non-choices and too much delayed gratification, but I'll hold on to that for now.

@arbitrarywater: As someone who came to the original AoW as a HoMM replacement, I think you're right on here. Planetfall is a very deliberate step into proper 4X waters, but it still feels like a game stuck between the more "instant action" HoMM style and something more Civ-like. I feel like there are parts of the game that have wildly different ideas about its pacing, and even as an AoW veteran I'm still trying to dial in the game's expectations of me (fun example, I typically find that various economic and military factors lead to me completely skipping over Tier 3 units, which means I can't claim the silver or gold landmarks until I have Tier 4s and the game is wrapping up anyways).

Anywho, it's a game I'm enjoying quite a bit, and hopefully once I have more than two proper rounds under my belt (I spent way too long with the campaign, which I don't advise) the rough edges will soften up a bit.

I've been a fan of the AoW series since the first one came out 20 years ago. I like the games a lot, but it always felt like the unit balance and combat mechanics needed some tweaking. Many Tier 3 units were able to wipe out entire stacks of Tier 1 units without taking any damage -- I always wished the game's designers could have figured out how to keep Tier 1 units relevant throughout the entire game. The diversity of units and their abilities always seemed cool initially, but they all became irrelevant once you leveled your hero into an unstoppable death machine.

I haven't played Planetfall yet (I wish I could play it on the subway on my Switch!), but I'm hoping Triumph has finally figured out a way to incentivize the player to use a variety of units instead of just multiple stacks of Tier 3 stuff.

@ybbaaabby said:

I think I'm hearing the same thing. The download and YouTube versions are all fine, but in the 'GB Player' it seems to (sometimes?) load audio with a lower sample-rate or higher compression for some reason.

Alex didn't really show this in the quick look but the way you mod units in this game really helps keep tier 1 units relevant. For example, towards the end of the quick look he finishes research for Electromagnetic Utilization which unlocks a mod that can be equipped on your units to give them +1 range, +10% accuracy +10% damage. The +1 range can make a big difference in certain situations. There's a lot of different mods that can be used in different situations, and higher tier units also gain access to mods, but in my experience so far the higher tier units haven't been completely overpowered compared to tier 1. You have 3 mod slots per unit and you can have two of the same unit types with different mods.

So, endless legend + xcom? Well this is my type of game lol. I have the original now since it was up for free a while ago but haven't tried it yet, but this looks super cool.

@catsanddogs: I'll second @littlegirl's comments re: unit mods extending the usefulness of lower tier units and add that there's a soft cap on Tier 4 units since they are the only units that have a cosmite upkeep cost (cosmite is used to build mods and higher-tier units), and it's a steep one. Between that and the prevalence of action-removing "stagger" attacks, there's a lot of power of in numbers, and the economics of the game make it hard to field even Tier 3s in large numbers, so Tier 1s stay relevant. I think this is the best "combined arms" feel in the series by far; most of my armies tend to be a lot of lower level units, a few heroes, and, eventually, something heavy that will draw a lot of attention and need to be protected.

I can't stop playing Planetfall. It's so much fun.

So Triumph is a dutch studio and i noticed that the default character seems to be named Jack Gelder both in a new game and on Alex savegame.... Is this a nod to the dutch football commentator Jack van Gelder? It has to be right?