Age of Wonders 4 - Dev Diary #8 - Cities and Expansion

[Silver]

The latest dev diary for Age of Wonders 4 talks about cities and how they can be expanded and goes into lots of detail.

City Domain

Cities project a sphere of influence around the city called their domain. This domain extracts resources and ensures rival players can't just enter it without consequences (more about diplomacy in a future dev diary!)

In Age of Wonders 3 and prior, this domain was a hexagon-shape that grew equally in all directions out from the city. This allowed it to exploit the natural resources of nearby resource nodes but gave the player no control. In Age of Wonders: Planetfall this was changed to a sector system, which resulted in player control over growth and more natural shapes that follow the environment. But these choice moments were few and far between and it was hard for many players to comprehend the impact of these choices.

Age of Wonders 4 uses a new province and expansion system. Provinces also follow the natural features of the world. They are smaller than sectors and unlike Planetfall you will gain a new province every time you gain a new population. Cities can easily get up to 15 population and 15 provinces, making your cities grow more organically in byte-sized chunks. This allows you to "steer" their expansion towards high value resources or to cut-off bottlenecks with your territory.

Province Improvements

Whenever you annex a new province you can immediately choose what type of province improvement will be built here.
The choice of improvements depends on what features that province has.

[...]

More information.

 

[Hastar]

That is what I wanted to hear about building up your cities and the early land rush of city placement. This will be a day 1 purchase for me. Can it come close to Shadow Magic or Civ4 Fall from Heaven?

 

[basharran]

This sounds as a very nice engaging way of growing without getting too complicated. I approve

 

[largh]

Yup, likely one of the games of the year for me, and the standard seems higher than in a decade or so!

 

[Morrandir]

Can't wait!

 

[Couchpotato]

It's the same city and expansion system used in Planetfall just with a fantasy flair.

 

[Morrandir]

If the artice is correct, it's not the same.

 

[Couchpotato]

"Based on the images and written text it's almost the same as Plantefall with some added changes." There does that sound better, or do you need a one page article why I think so.

Reasons Why:

1. Building/Expanding is the same.
2. Resources work the same.
3. Claiming territory looks to work the same.

I hated the system used in Planetfall as you had to start from the beginning each campaign, and midway through the campaign your bored, and want to quit.

 

[Morrandir]

"Almost the same" is not the same as "the same". It's only almost the same.
So yes, that sounds better.

I've never played planetfall and obviously not AoW4, but I think it's not right to say that it's the same when the article says "... and unlike Planetfall you will...".

 

[Couchpotato]

Sure whatever that's my personal opinion and it's not going to change. Good-day.

 

[largh]

I hated how this worked in Planetfall as you had to start from the beginning each campaign, and midway through the campaign your bored, and want to quit the game.

The campaign also killed my interest to the game. Didn't help that playing maps with friends wasn't very interesting either. I never played AoW3 campaigns. Not even sure whether they exist. Single maps were fantastic in that game. I plan to do the same with AoW4: only focus on playing maps alone and with friends.

 

[SSIGuy]

Hmmm... Planetfall was a disappointment for me. I felt Triumph overreached on that game in trying to add more 4x elements and some of them were poorly implemented and tedious. I stopped playing it fairly early on, so maybe one things improved with patches and DLC. And while I like a lot of what I'm reading for AoW4 (and will definitely play it), the expansion mechanics do seem awfully similar to Planetfall, which isn't a good thing imo.