Age of Wonders 4 - Dev Diary #21

Couchpotato spotted the dev diary #21 for Age of Wonders 4:

Dev Diary #21: Watcher Update: Research and Magic Victory

Hi champions, wizard kings and dragon lords! I’m Bas, a game designer at Triumph who has written some Development Journals in the past about Sieges and Ancient Wonders.

Today we’re going to be taking a look at some of the major changes we’re working on for the upcoming Watcher update. In particular updates to the Research system, and a shiny new Magic Victory system featuring Gold Ancient Wonders! Some of these changes were put into the open beta last week, while others will be coming some time today. Make sure to keep an eye for when that goes live!

Tome Requirements and Research Speed

Since the release of Age of Wonders 4, lots of players have made all kinds of combinations and builds using the tome system. Stacking all kinds of bonuses and sometimes reaching incredible research incomes in order to make the most powerful builds! While this is where a lot of the fun lies for players, we also identified some issues:

Many early tome unit enchantments increased damage for units, which when stacked by researching a lot of early game tomes, you could create incredible damage output on early game units for little mana, research and gold.

After players have built up their research economy. Low tier tomes become incredibly quick to research. This also meant that players who had finished their tier 5 tomes would be able to go through the rest of the tome library fast. And some would even have completed the entire tome lineup in a single realm, let alone finish up several tomes in a single turn!

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