Black_Hart: Hey all :)
I heard that there are NO campaigns whatsoever in 4.
That's not entirely true. The storyline is placed in 5 story realms that are listed in the same place as others when you start a singleplayer game. Quite a few classic AoW characters appear in it.
Black_Hart: Also, that there are no real differences between races and that the game is sort of "globalized" and that the faction lack their specific cultural identity.
Also partially true. The flow of creating a race is as follows:
- pick a race appearance (human, elf, orc, goblin, etc.).
these have some static traits. - pick a race culture (feudal, high, dark, mystic...).
these also have some static traits and will affect which units you get in your main race's cities. - pick two additional society traits.
- pick your first tome. this affects your starting magic/upgrades, but you can pick any other tomes later on
- customize your ruler (class, appearance, starting weapons) and last touches of the race appearance
The difference from prior AoW games is that you don't get the same race presets, but get to tinker around with them more. Arsenals of feudal and dark cultures, and the way they start the game are not the same.
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Additionally, the game has the most similar city region system to AoW Planetfall, BUT the regions are smaller and there's more of them.
A BIG change is also the splitting of building and unit queues. Unit training speed is not affected by the Production resource (hammer) but Draft (sword) and allows you to build structures and units at the same time in the same city.
Diplomacy is more meaningful and elaborate, sieges are meaningful and give the defender time to react, auto-combat doesn't fail as often, tomes have come a LONG way since version 1.0, map customization and variety is higher than before, the city cap (which can be raised in the mid- and late-game) prevents snowballing...
The only big downside is the gutting of naval combat (basically there are only a few neutral water-only units like krakens, but player-produced ones just embark, and melee ones switch whatever they have for a ram attack while ranged/magic ones just do their thing).
The story realms are a mixed bag - the map templates and special rules they chose were actually nice and creative, but the difficulty skyrockets in realm 3, and realm 5 has the difficulty and narrative as if it skipped at least two prior missions.
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Worth noting is that a lot of the game's criticisms online came before the major updates - at launch, the game was buggy, incredibly desync-prone, while tomes that bring spells and unit upgrades (even some unit unlocks) and affect your affinity in the empire development tree - had actually little effect and were a chore to even choose. The devs went berserk in the first two months to fix bugs and then rebalanced the game plus new content without even mentioning the DLC.
Now, to mention the DLC - there are two major and two minor ones.
Of the ones currently out, Dragon Dawn is minor and adds the Dragon Lord ruler type that plays quite differently to regular Champion and Wizard Kings, two tomes, one map template, and the lizard racial type. Empires & Ashes is the major one, with the Reaver culture that is basically the Commonwealth/Dreadnoughts from AoW3, avian race, 4 tomes and 2 new story realms (first one is pretty good, second one starts interesting but derails mid-game).
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If you played Planetfall, you'll be right at home with AoW4 if your main way of play are skirmishes or multiplayer with friends. If you haven't, treat it like Sid Meier's Civilization, where each new numbered title has the same core gameplay, but adds and changes a lot of things that come down to personal preference.
