There are some good ideas in AOW4, but it has too many bad points which make it a chore to play. Some examples: Independent guards of treasure sites grow in power if left alone, but not in ancient wonders. The result is that low-value treasure sites end up being much harder to take than high-value ancient wonders. It makes no sense. Killing enemy leaders and heroes gains you no advantage. You do get a small amount of gold and some equipment, but within a few turns the leader is back with newly-recruited heroes, every one of them around the same level and with the same or better equipment as the ones you just killed. They've somehow managed to make the graphics worse than AOW3, and even AOW2. I'm not talking about how pretty it looks, I'm talking about how easy it is to tell what's going on in combat. The units blend into the background and it's difficult to distinguish between them without zooming right in. The developers obviously realised this was the case, hence the big circles above the units' heads showing you what type they are. I find myself looking at the circles rather than the units themselves during battles, which is a shame. The adjacent-hex rule has been removed in favour of picking two of your nearby groups at random, so you'll sometimes get a group you didn't want. I could go on with various other examples, but I'll finish with probably my biggest criticism, which is that the rate you can build up an army is so high you have big 18 v 18 (or near that) battles so frequently that they become tedious. It feels like it's been designed for people who like to auto-resolve combat, which I don't. I can't fathom why you'd want to build up an army only to not use it. In summary, I don't see any reason to play this in preference to any of the previous games in the series.
