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General discussionPre-order: Age of Wonders 4 from Paradox Interactive(54 posts)(54 posts)
(54 posts)
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This is my favourite topic
Posted April 03, 2023
Rule a fantasy realm of your own design! Explore new magical realms in Age of Wonders’ signature blend of 4X strategy and turn-based tactical combat. Control a faction that grows and changes as you expand your empire with each turn – pre-order of Age of Wonders 4 from Paradox Interactive is now available on GOG alongside its Premium Edition!



Age of Wonders in an iconic series of turn-based strategies dating all the way back to 1999. Throughout the years AoW titles managed to capture the hearts of players and critics with their deep gameplay mechanics, intricate fantasy world-building, engaging campaigns, great customization options and incredible replayability.

Now, in less than a month (on May 2nd), we’ll be able to enjoy the latest entry in the series, developed by Triumph Studios and brought to us by the one and only Paradox Interactive.

Moreover, by pre-ordering Age of Wonders 4 you will claim bonus content in the form of the additional ruler, the Tigran High King Aric Rex, as well as his Athlan Imperial Armour Set with Lion Plate armor, Imperial Cape and Athlan Crown. And by pre-ordering Age of Wonders 4: Premium Edition you’ll not only get access to the base game and the aforementioned bonus content, but also the Expansion Pass for the upcoming 4 DLCs and Archmage Attire Day 1 instant unlock.



With Age of Wonders 4, Triumph Studios’ award-winning strategy series has emerged into a new age, evolving the game’s iconic empire building, role-playing, and warfare to the next level. A new storytelling event system and hugely customizable empires provide an endlessly replayable experience, where each game adds a new chapter to your ever-growing saga.

Powerful Wizard Kings have returned to the realms to reign as gods among mortals. Claim and master the Tomes of Magic to evolve your people, and prepare for an epic battle that will determine the ages to come.



Creating the empire of our wildest fantasies by creating our followers and building anything from a clan of cannibal halflings to mystic moon elves, or recreate our favorite fantasy tropes. Taking control of powerful tomes of magic to enchant our armies and evolve our people. Seeking glory through brutal domination, cunning alliances, or ultimate arcane knowledge, and writing your legacy into the very fabric of the realm itself. All of that will await us in Age of Wonders 4.

Pre-order this strategy and role-playing title like you’ve never seen before now and make your mark on its vast, reactive world.
Posted April 05, 2023
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eric5h5: Paradox is the publisher, not the developer. Triumph makes these games and you do know when the DLC will stop coming. They made 3 expansions for Planetfall like they said they would, the end, there isn't any more.
Tell me you don't know how games publishing works without telling me you don't know how games publishing works.

The publisher determines the release schedule and what content they want released as part of the contract. I don't have high hope.
Post edited April 05, 2023 by paladin181
Posted April 05, 2023
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BitMaster_1980: There is a reason HoMM-like is practically a genre definition and that's because in many ways it's doing its own thing in a very specific way and some things (like a decent economy or a tech tree) are practically completely absent.
They are practically absent or completely absent?

I do not know if HoMM is a genre definition AND then games that not do things "in a very specific way" are NOT in that genre. Is HoMM IV doing things like HoMM III, or II, V? Are commanders needed to move troops in HoMM? Do they appear as units in battles? So, yes, even HoMM games do things in different ways, although there are common factors, like bases and unit production and... hey, those are in AoW too!!

People compared Disciples (II especially) to HoMM favourably. They have things in common, but they are different. Then, KIng's Bounty gets comparisons as well, and there you only have a single marching army. Still.

Do you know one game that is rather different? Fantasy General.

Possibly the biggest difference between AoW and HoMM is that AoW is closer to Master of Magic, where the main character and their spell book is rather central to the gameplay and the story. Even more starting from Age of Wonders II. I guess that you can agree to that?

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Reglisse: I would prefer 10% discount for pre-order...I'm not fond of "pre-order bonus"...
Agreed! Bad, bad, Paradox... (wag of the finger).
Post edited April 05, 2023 by Carradice
Posted April 05, 2023
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Carradice: Possibly the biggest difference between AoW and HoMM is that AoW is closer to Master of Magic, where the main character and their spell book is rather central to the gameplay and the story. Even more starting from Age of Wonders II. I guess that you can agree to that?
The spell book is definitely quite essential and certainly very central to the gameplay in the HOMM games, especially HOMM 3. I know that because I recently tried playing the campaign in HOMM 3 where you to play as a character named Yog who is forbidden by the game's mechanics from using a spellbook and and can learn no spells whatsoever, and that makes him and his armies become incredibly gimpy and useless in combat and vastly underpowered compared to any enemy hero he might face, and that single gameplay change of removing the hero's spellbook single-handedly makes that HOMM campaign become incredibly anti-fun & aggravating to play.

But if spells were not central to the gameplay in HOMM, then the things that I've just described would not be so.

And spells are also essential to the adventure map in HOMM as well, as not having town portal and/or dimension door spells makes the player's ability to move efficiently and/or to defend towns properly become incredibly gimped, and you also need to use spells on the adventure map in order to know how to spend your movement points wisely, like spells to see the locations of resource mines, and spells to see the locations of enemy towns and heroes, and spells to create or summon boats, etc., and without the using of such spells the enemy has a massive advantage.
Posted April 05, 2023
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Carradice: Possibly the biggest difference between AoW and HoMM is that AoW is closer to Master of Magic, where the main character and their spell book is rather central to the gameplay and the story. Even more starting from Age of Wonders II. I guess that you can agree to that?
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Ancient-Red-Dragon: The spell book is definitely quite essential and certainly very central to the gameplay in the HOMM games
Yes, it is important. Thence it is not easy to separate these games as if in different genres, which was the point! Still, AoW feels more MoM than HoMM (for those who have not played AoW but have played MoM).
Post edited April 05, 2023 by Carradice
Posted April 05, 2023
I bought AOW 3 during the Spring Sale and I just ran it in order to see if I might want to buy AOW 4.

First I ran into a problem with the launcher that starts before the game being microscopic and so too was the text in it, which was also all scrunched together as well.

Then I searched the internet and found a St*** forum thread where the devs commented about the issue, but didn't actually offer a working solution to it. However, an end-user posted in one of those threads with a solution that made the launcher become slightly-less microscopic and which also made the text no longer scrunch together.

Then when I went into the game itself, and to my horror I found microscopic in-game text and also microscopic in-game UI elements too.

So then I searched the internet again, and found more St*** forum threads with commentary from the devs, in which they offered the non-solution solution to check the launcher box under Graphics tab which says "Autoscale UI." But even with that enabled, the UI and text still fail to scale to a level which makes them comfortably-readable, hence it is a useless option even when it "works" correctly to the full extent that the devs intended.

And I found another thread with devs' commentary where they linked to an end-user's "unofficial solution" to create a CFG file and then manually specify an interface size value within that file.

And the devs also said in one of those threads that there is no way to scale the text size independently from the UI size (which sucks).

So I just tested out that CFG solution, and I realized setting it to any value over 1.2 causes the game's UI to break and therefore values over 1.2 cannot be used at all. And maybe 1.2 also breaks things too, but I just didn't realize that yet since I only played to the title screen and to the first adventure map screen in the tutorial (so there might be things later in the game that cause even the 1.2 CFG size to break the game).

Leaving the value at 1.2 makes some of the text and some of the UI elements become slightly less microscopic, but it seems to have zero effect whatsoever on other in-game text elements, like the texts that appear when you hover the cursor over neutral armies on the adventure map, which is still uber-microscopic.

I really hate when devs make text and/or UI elements in their games be microscopic, and don't provide any good scaling options to make them become comfortable to look at.

I have no idea they did that. And this stuff could easily wreck AOW 4 if they didn't change their design philosophy in order not to allow any more microscopic text or UI elements into their games and/or not bothering to create scaling solutions that actually work.
Post edited April 05, 2023 by Ancient-Red-Dragon
Posted April 05, 2023
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Ancient-Red-Dragon: I really hate when devs make text and/or UI elements in their games be microscopic, and don't provide any good scaling options to make them become comfortable to look at.
To be fair, high resolution displays are really new (and still fairly uncommon). Devs are still working through the struggles. We used to accept changing our display resolutions and running full screen use. We don't anymore. So some of that is on us.

I'm not sure of other solutions. I've heard virtual monitor drivers are starting to be a thing, but never explored. I know of and use screen splitters, but not that have scaling within one of the splits. There are also "fullscreenizer" or "integerscaler" (etc) that indicate they would be useful for this, but I've never needed one. So far. It's inevitable I will some day.
Posted April 05, 2023
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Ancient-Red-Dragon: I bought AOW 3 during the Spring Sale and I just ran it in order to see if I might want to buy AOW 4.

First I ran into a problem with the launcher that starts before the game being microscopic and so too was the text in it, which was also all scrunched together as well.

Then I searched the internet and found a St*** forum thread where the devs commented about the issue, but didn't actually offer a working solution to it. However, an end-user posted in one of those threads with a solution that made the launcher become slightly-less microscopic and which also made the text no longer scrunch together.

Then when I went into the game itself, and to my horror I found microscopic in-game text and also microscopic in-game UI elements too.

So then I searched the internet again, and found more St*** forum threads with commentary from the devs, in which they offered the non-solution solution to check the launcher box under Graphics tab which says "Autoscale UI." But even with that enabled, the UI and text still fail to scale to a level which makes them comfortably-readable, hence it is a useless option even when it "works" correctly to the full extent that the devs intended.

And I found another thread with devs' commentary where they linked to an end-user's "unofficial solution" to create a CFG file and then manually specify an interface size value within that file.

And the devs also said in one of those threads that there is no way to scale the text size independently from the UI size (which sucks).

So I just tested out that CFG solution, and I realized setting it to any value over 1.2 causes the game's UI to break and therefore values over 1.2 cannot be used at all. And maybe 1.2 also breaks things too, but I just didn't realize that yet since I only played to the title screen and to the first adventure map screen in the tutorial (so there might be things later in the game that cause even the 1.2 CFG size to break the game).

Leaving the value at 1.2 makes some of the text and some of the UI elements become slightly less microscopic, but it seems to have zero effect whatsoever on other in-game text elements, like the texts that appear when you hover the cursor over neutral armies on the adventure map, which is still uber-microscopic.

I really hate when devs make text and/or UI elements in their games be microscopic, and don't provide any good scaling options to make them become comfortable to look at.

I have no idea they did that. And this stuff could easily wreck AOW 4 if they didn't change their design philosophy in order not to allow any more microscopic text or UI elements into their games and/or not bothering to create scaling solutions that actually work.
most people don't run 8k resolutions ofc!
Posted April 05, 2023
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paladin181: Tell me you don't know how games publishing works without telling me you don't know how games publishing works.
LOL. You don't really know what you're talking about.

The publisher determines the release schedule and what content they want released as part of the contract. I don't have high hope.
Maybe, maybe not. It depends on what you've negotiated. Some publishers are very hands-off, some are not. I've seen no evidence that Paradox dictates amount of DLC.

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Zimerius: most people don't run 8k resolutions ofc!
Yeah, AoW 3 is almost 10 years old and GUI scaling options barely existed at the time. Things change; GUI scaling used to not exist at all and 640x480 was "high-res", so if you wanted to read the GUI you had to lower the resolution.
Post edited April 05, 2023 by eric5h5
Posted April 06, 2023
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Ancient-Red-Dragon: I really hate when devs make text and/or UI elements in their games be microscopic, and don't provide any good scaling options to make them become comfortable to look at.
Same here. Good design/coding ought to make the interface and the text in particular future-proof and adaptable to any screen.

IIRC, the company that made Galactic CIvilizations II wrote software utilities and used that experience with their games so GalCiv was suppossed to be accessible with any kind of screen to come.
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mqstout: We used to accept changing our display resolutions and running full screen use. We don't anymore.
Yes. For modern monitors, when you take them out of their native resolution, the image becomes a bit blurry. This did not happen with cathodic tubes.

But it is good to remember that there is a fallback for those games that do not look well in supersized screens.
Post edited April 06, 2023 by Carradice
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Community
General discussionPre-order: Age of Wonders 4 from Paradox Interactive(54 posts)(54 posts)
(54 posts)