Age of Wonders 4 News

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Hello again aspiring Godir! Sam Minh here, I previously wrote the Dev Diary on Cities and Expansion. For the last Dev Diary before the release of Age of Wonders 4 on May 2nd, we will be taking a look at the final puzzle piece of any game, the way to achieve victory!

The different victory conditions are meant to do a few things while playing the game:

1. Guide you to your next objective
   You can track one or more victory conditions and find out what the next necessary step is towards victory.
   
2. Allow different playstyles
   The different victory conditions have different ways to achieve them, and even the same victory conditions can be achieved in different ways. They ensure that you can be an aggressive or defensive player, a diplomat, a conqueror or an opportunist.
   
3. End the game when it's done
   The victory conditions will declare someone the victor when they have shown a clear mastery over a particular aspect of the world.
   

There are four victory conditions available by default:

• Military Victory
  
• Expansion Victory
  
• Magic Victory
  
• Score Victory
  

We will have a deep dive for each victory condition, how you achieve them, and what playstyles and affinities would fit that victory condition. Lastly we will get a taste on how you can customize your own gameplay experience by changing realm traits and game settings to change how you go about achieving victory in Age of Wonders 4.



In the Quest tab, you can track one or more victory conditions and see what the next step is to achieve it. It also shows you what rank you are currently for each victory condition to get an indication to how you are doing compared to the other Empires.

[h2]Military Victory[/h2]

The Military Victory is the most obvious way to win the game, by eliminating the opposition. In order to win via conquest, you will have to defeat all other Empires, be it human or AI. To defeat another Empire, you will need to make sure their Ruler is in the Void and their Throne City is conquered. This will cut the connection between the Godir and that realm, banishing them from the world. When you defeat another Empire, an event triggers that presents you with a few options on how to deal with their departure.



Vassalization
Another way to defeat another Empire is to make them your vassal, by becoming their Overlord. If someone accepts your request for vassalage, this basically means they admit defeat and won’t be in the race for victory anymore. They can still play the game as normal, but are tied to their Overlord and cannot engage in diplomacy on their own. If they do manage to achieve victory themselves, that victory will be dedicated to their overlord instead.

By becoming a vassal, you can still continue to play with other human players without having to drop out of the game. And who knows, maybe your overlord will be gracious enough to lift your status as vassal, or someone else will manage to defeat your overlord…

Rushing
Previous Age of Wonders titles often had a very explosive beginning because of players rushing other people's throne cities. In Age of Wonders 4 this is lessened with the Siege system (see the previous Dev Diary). You can no longer capture cities with a single flying bird, nor can you quickly take a city when someone is slightly out of position. Combined with the extra defenses a Throne City gets, rushing them will be harder than before. Though someone who focuses on early game armies will still have an advantage over someone who is trying to boom their economy.

Synergies

Chaos players will find a lot of synergy when trying to go for a military victory. Every Empire Skill will in some way reward aggression and conquest. Pillaging and razing will also fuel your economy and help you to get new units to the front line.



Materium is also a good choice for a military victory, especially for those who want to build up first and then crush their enemies with high-quality troops. They also excel in sieges, both defensively, and offensively.

Order has a different way to bolster their military. They have many bonuses that improve the amount of units and the quality of units they get from the Rally of the Lieges. They also have bonuses that make it easier to create vassals from conquered cities, allowing them to consolidate before advancing.

[h2]Expansion Victory[/h2]

The Expansion Victory is a more peaceful method to achieve victory. The first step towards this victory is to control a certain number of provinces in the world. The amount needed changes based on the size of the map. Once you reach the required number of provinces, you will need to build three Beacons of Unity in three different cities.

Once you light the Beacons, a countdown timer of 15 turns will start. During this time rebelling forces opposing your unification spawn around the Beacons in an attempt to stop you. This also gives all other Rulers a last chance to stop you from winning the game and it prevents surprise victories.



As well as the provinces annexed by your cities, those owned by your free cities are also counted, as long as they at least have Bonded Vassalage with you. This is the level above neutral, meaning you have to invest time to nurture your vassals for them to count. Conquering vassals through force gives a negative relation penalty with them, making it harder for you to achieve a Bonded Vassalage with them. This means that the Expansion Victory works very well for more diplomatic playstyles.

Synergies

Nature is a natural fit for the Expansion victory. A lot of bonuses increase city growth and province acquisition. It also gives bonuses to units inside your domain, such as healing or movement speed.



Order achieves this victory via the diplomatic angle. They excel in consolidating control over their vassals. Be it via gaining an extra Whispering Stone, gaining better Relations with Free Cities or by reinforcing them with extra units.

Shadow players are versatile and have some ways to benefit from vassals. They also gain access to an extra Whispering Stone themselves. With shadow players, you never know what their true agenda is.

[h2]Magic Victory[/h2]

The Magic Victory is the most defensive victory condition. You don’t need to go out into the world to defeat other Empires or acquire more Vassals. To achieve this victory you will need to build three Affinity Province Improvements dedicated to a specific affinity, a Seed, a Root and a Heart. Each is unlocked after unlocking higher-tier Tomes, so you will need to unlock a Tier 5 Tome for this victory condition. Once you have all three, you will start the final ritual. Similar to the Expansion Victory, a 15 turn countdown will begin. Hostile armies spawn that attempt to destroy the provinces and all other players will have a last chance to stop you.

Since you need to get a Tier 5 Tome, a high knowledge income is beneficial. It will allow you to be the first to start the final ritual for the magic victory. The Affinity Province Improvements cost a lot of mana, so you will also need to have an adequate amount of it to build all three of them. Finally, building the Affinity Province non-tradeable casus belli to all other Empires, as it signifies your intent to go for the magic victory. Together with the hostile armies that spawn during the countdown, you will need to have a good enough military to defend against these threats.

Affinity Province Improvements
The Affinity Province Improvements also have some extra effects attached to them. This incentivizes you to build them early and get the bonuses. The effects are as follows:

Seed

• Unlocked with Tier 3 Tomes.
  
• +1 of the affinity.
  
• Research skills of the affinity are 10% cheaper.
  

Root

• Unlocked with Tier 4 Tomes.
  
• +1 of the affinity.
  
• Spells of the affinity are 20% cheaper to cast.
  
• Buff and heal spells of the affinity also have an extra positive effect.
  

Heart

• Unlocked with the Tier 5 Tome.
  
• +1 of the affinity.
  
• Debuff spells of the affinity also have an extra negative effect.
  
• Damage spells of the affinity deal an additional 20 damage.
  

[h2]Victory Spell[/h2]

During the 15 turns the ritual is channeling, you also gain two additional effects:

• Mana and Casting Points of spells of the associated affinity are reduced by 50%.
  
• Depending on the affinity, an extra Combat Enchantment is active while you are in combat.
  

This makes it easier to use your big spells to defend your Affinity Province Improvements. Or you might use it on the offensive and instead take out another Ruler.

With all these effects stacked together you will become the most powerful spellcaster and finally prove your magical superiority over all others. Let’s look at what bonuses an Astral player will have during combat:

• Astral Spells cost 70% less mana and casting points.
  
• Astral Buff spells also provide 2 Bolstered Resistance.
  
• Astral Debuff spells also inflict 2 Sundered Resistance.
  
• Astral Damage spells inflict +20 lightning damage.
  
• Every turn during combat, a random enemy takes 15 mixed elemental damage and is inflicted with 2 Sundered Resistance and 2 Status Vulnerability.
  

Synergies

Astral is a clear candidate for a Magic Victory. It has ample mana and research bonuses in the Empire Skill Tree, Society Traits and Tomes. And of course Astral is good at spellcasting, which is empowered even more via the Affinity Province Improvements and the Age of Astral spell.

Shadow is also good at acquiring knowledge. Some Empire Skills can give bursts of knowledge and a lot of Special province Improvements in the shadow Tomes provide good knowledge income.



[h2]Score Victory[/h2]

The Score Victory is normally only triggered if a winner cannot be decided because of a stalemate. This would be quite a rare event with the different ways to achieve victory. But if after a set turn amount (150 turns by default) no winner is decided the game ends and a winner is chosen with the highest score. This turn count can be reduced, increased or turned off entirely.

Score is based on how well you are doing 5 different aspects of the game: military, diplomatic, economy, expansion and research. Each category keeps track of certain actions you have taken in the last few turns and scores them. Military score for example, gets higher the more units you have and the more battles you win. These categories also inform your ranking in each victory condition. Your final score for the Score Victory is based on the position you have in all 5 categories.



[h2]Story Realms & Traits[/h2]

Story Realms
Each Story Realm offers a unique narrative with other paths towards victory. They are often a shortcut towards victory when the story has reached its conclusion. The condition is often the defeat of your main rival in a realm, but the way to achieve that can differ. You can get quests that allow you to forge an alliance with one of your rival’s vassals and make them rebel against their overlord.

But this does not mean you cannot go for any of the other victory conditions. Often the story realms keep the other victory conditions (except score victory) so you can still go for them when they become convenient or when they suit your narrative.

Presence Traits
Presence Realm traits add specialized Rulers which present unique challenges. Some of these Presence Traits include a unique victory condition granted by completing a quest. For example, the Pretender Kings Realm Presence Trait adds 3 Rulers that start off more powerful than normal and are locked in a war with each other, this Presence trait adds a victory condition that demands each of the 3 Rulers is either Allied with or defeated.



Other traits may have simpler quests, the Demon Prince trait, for example, just requires the defeat of the Demon Prince himself.

Realm Traits
Some Realm traits may interfere with your normal path to victory. Megacities for example restricts players to only a single City which makes Magic or Diplomatic victories impossible, requiring players to pursue more aggressive paths to victory.

Another is Crystalline Abundance, which makes Mana nodes abundant on the world map. This allows you to build more Research Posts that produce knowledge than you would normally have. Or you can use it to build more Conduits for mana and create an army of summoned units to crush your enemies.



[h2]Victory Settings[/h2]

Outside of the Campaign, you have full control over which victory conditions you want to be active. The Score, Magic and Expansion victories can be disabled entirely. You can also change other settings during realm setup, such as the Game Speed, which changes the pace of the game and thus how quickly you can achieve victory. Among other things, Slow Game speed increases the cost of knowledge a research skill requires and the food cost a city needs to acquire a new population. This means a Magic Victory will be harder to achieve, but you will have more time to maneuver armies and settle things in wars.

Allied Victory
Another setting you can change is whether or not to allow Allied Victory. In team games this is turned on by default. But in open diplomacy you can create or break alliances at any time. When Allied Victory is turned on, you achieve victory if anyone you are allied with achieves victory. For the conquest victory this means that any allies are excluded in the victory condition and you both win if you and your allies are the only ones left standing.



[h2]Conclusion[/h2]

There are many ways to achieve victory, not just in which victory condition you want to go for, but also in the way you want to achieve that victory. You can focus on your victory when creating your faction, making every decision with a specific goal in mind. You can make a balanced faction that could go for any victory. Or you can make it up as you go, capitalizing on opportunities as they present themselves.

Every victory will give you XP for your Pantheon, which you can use to unlock new cosmetics, society traits, realm traits and more. After a victory you can also ascend your Ruler into your Pantheon. Whether it was through conquest, diplomacy or a mastery of magic, all victories contribute to your pantheon progression. Check out this Dev Diary to learn more about Pantheons.

And that does it for this last Dev Diary before the release May 2nd. I hope you are all looking forward to playing the game for yourselves! We certainly are looking forward to your reactions. It’s just a few more days, so let’s get ready!



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Greetings again future Conquerors! Welcome to another Development Journal! I’m Bas, who also wrote the Development Journal on Ancient Wonders. This time, we’re not looking at cracking open Ancient Wonders for treasure, but rather, we’ll be looking at cracking open Cities! I’ll be talking about the new Siege System in Age of Wonders 4!



Cities in Age of Wonders are the core of an empire’s economy, which in turn fuels their war machine. Having one of your cities taken is therefore a huge blow and in the case of someone’s capital, could even result in a player losing or winning the game.

In Age of Wonders 3 players had to make sure they always had armies close to vulnerable cities as they were not defended by default. In Planetfall, we had garrisons to make sure cities and sector bases were defended at all times. However, it added a lot of extra units to already huge fights with exactly the same layout, making players tired of fighting these kinds of battles and auto-resolving them. It also couldn’t stop a player from launching surprise attacks and overwhelming the garrison in a single turn.

Age of Wonders 4 offered us an opportunity to sit down to tackle and improve upon these points. Our aim was to give defenders time to respond, to add more variety to City battles, and to not use the Garrison system to cut down on the amount of units involved in battle.

In the end, we came up with the Siege system, where defending players can invest in structures that help to delay attackers and affect the battle map. Attackers in turn have to lay siege to the cities for multiple turns in the world map where they can invest in Siege Projects to bring siege engines to the battle, or otherwise counter some of the defenses the city has, before they can launch a final decisive battle!



Let’s go back to those defensive structures for a minute, we’ll get into the siege itself later:

Some of the coolest and most appreciated parts of Age of Wonders 3 and Planetfall’s City battles were that certain structures such as turrets would be represented in battle. In Age of Wonders 4, we tried to go a step further! We now have several categories of Defense Structures that will be represented in the Siege battle:

• Wall Defense Structures will contribute the most to Fortification Health (more on that later), and at least one wall must be built in a city to add the requirement for attackers to siege it. Furthermore, they are represented as different obstacles in combat! Palisade walls are wooden obstacles with low health, but Stone walls are Fortified obstacles with a lot of health that are tricky to take down. The latter also will have less breaches at the start of combat. Making it easier to funnel the attacker down killzones!
  
  
  
  
• Tower Defense Structures are the turrets of Planetfall. They spawn units during combat alongside the walls with incredible range and will automatically fire upon attacking units. There are even some more special Towers that instead cast magical buffs or even heal nearby defending units.
  
  
  
  
• Battlement Defense Structures create special obstacles on the positions just behind the wall that benefit the Defender in some way. They often buff Ranged attacks, and can specialize further in buffing Magical or Physical ranged attacks. Such as units gaining extra range, more accuracy, or straight up setting target locations on fire with their attacks!
  
  
  
  
• Support Defense Structures add special modifiers to the combat, often in the form of Combat Enchantments! They can do things like spawn Caltrop obstacles in front of the walls. Forcing attackers to go through Slowing and Sharp terrain which inflicts bleeding on them as they try to pile through the breaches!
  
  

All defensive structures also add Fortification Health, which is displayed beneath city banners and determines the rough amount of time attackers will need to spend sieging the city before they can launch their attack.

This is visible to everyone as long as you’ve discovered the city, so it’s handy to scout out enemy cities before moving in to know what kind of time investment you’ll need to make! If you have a good eye, you can even spot the kind of walls they have by looking at the city model.



Alright, enough about the defender preparing. Let’s look at the attacking side!

You can start a siege simply by initiating an attack or move order on a hostile walled city! You must do this with at least one hero available in the army who will be leading the siege (Marauders are exempt from this rule, yep, that’s right, infestation stacks can and will siege you!).

A prompt will ask you if you wish to start a siege, and a time estimation in turns is given. Pressing Start will begin your siege!



In the first turn of sieging, you have a nice overview of the Fortification Health of the city and its defense structures. Every turn during a siege, the Fortification Health (wall icon) will be diminished by the amount of Fortification Damage (broken wall icon) you deal. Until Fortification Health reaches 0 at which point you can initiate an attack!

Fortification Damage per turn is determined by:

• A base value of 10 damage per turn
  
• Units with Siege Breaker in besieging armies, such as Giants and Iron Golems
  
• Siege Projects active during the siege
  

Siege Projects are specific actions the attacker wants to undertake to take out certain defenses of the attacker, speed up the siege, construct siege engines or employ something else like stealing population from the besieged city, they often come at a cost and take up a Siege Project slots, which you can get more of through empire skills.

As the attacker you can select which Siege Projects you wish to undertake only in the first turn of the siege, at which point they will be locked as your armies are executing your plans. In the case of Siege Projects that speed up a siege, they will contribute extra Fortification Damage done per turn.

This was set up in a way to have siege projects be more effective when a city is heavily fortified, creating a different balance between cost and effect per siege.

Headlong Assault for example, which contributes +5 Fortification Damage on top of the base 10 Fortification Damage, will reduce siege time with a city of 30 Fortification Health by 1 turn. But in a city with 120 Fortification Health, it can reduce it by 4 turns!

All empires have access to a multitude of standard Siege Projects, but more can be obtained through tomes or even Ancient Wonders. Such as a displacing effect from the Tome of Mayhem’s Sow Confusion siege project, or the Soul Siphon siege project from Tome of the Reaper to gain extra souls upon completion of the siege and gain Zombie units in combat.



While a siege is progressing, if the attacker has brought multiple armies, they don’t have to simply wait around the walls for the timer to run out. Reserve armies can simply run around the domain, scouting for hidden relief forces on the way or pillaging province improvements, especially Special Province Improvements like Teleporters and Spell Jammers you may want to take out while besieging to make sure no nasty surprises will await you once in battle.

Be aware though that this leaves the defender with opportunities for counter attacks by catching you outside of reinforcement range! This lets sieges be more dynamic.



Let’s quickly go back to the Defender, while their city is under siege, it suffers a hefty -50% penalty on all resource incomes except Draft, and cannot produce any City Structures during a siege either! This incentivizes defenders to take action instead of just waiting for the very last moment. Luckily, there are ways for defenders to prepare while a siege is going on.

A defender can see what Siege Projects are being taken against the city and how long the siege lasts. They can still recruit units in the city, rallying a quick militia to hold out against defenders to discourage the attacker from splitting up or even counter attack.

While this is going on, Defenders can also rally defenders from other places, Rally of the Lieges and Empire Rites can often prove handy in these situations to raise a quick army. Defenders can still freely move defenders in and out of the city.

We’ve tried restricting movement for defenders in besieged cities but found it too restrictive for the defenders to raise a proper defense. This allows defenders to actually undertake successful relief efforts and keeps attackers more on their toes.



Once the timer has run out, the Fortification Health depleted to 0, the attacker can initiate the battle! The battle map is a lot more grim and ridden with destruction than previous city battle maps. After all, a siege has now taken place and breaches have appeared in the walls! These breaches form perfect funnels for the defender to exploit. But the attacker can, if they brought the right units, spells or siege engines, create their own additional breaches by attacking the walls!

Next to that, City Defense Structures and Siege Projects can also affect the battle map as described! Siege battles can now really look different depending on what has been undertaken by both defender and attacker.



As for the battlemap. It’s always challenging to create a city map that is balanced yet not samey, look grimey yet not unreadable. What me and Sara have done primarily is realize a vision of a battered city wall, a last bastion of defense, by littering the battlefield with broken remnants of the city, with plenty of muddy puddles and the occasional corpse fallen from previous attempts at breaching.

Most of these are decorative to create enough space for the players’ massive armies. And we’ve created custom lighting to contrast the units and line of wall obstacles from the background decoration!

Speaking off, Wall obstacles count as cover, making targets count as Obscured when they shoot over them. However, if defending units stand on the intact battlement hexes, they get to ignore Obscured as they have the high ground!



Next to this, breaches will already appear at the start of battle, unlike in previous Age of Wonders games, as you’ve been besieging these cities for a while. These are generated in a controlled way to create killzones for defenders, but with the occasional unfortunate breach that allows fast units to break through quickly!

If you’ve brought siege engines or units with Demolisher, you can also easily create new breaches in the walls that are still intact, or destroy enemy towers or battlements if they have any.



So, there you have it! Sieges do away with the micro-intense cat and mouse movements of the old games. Instead creating more trust for players to venture out with their armies. Giving them enough time to come back to, or raise new armies in defense. While attackers can employ tools to counter defenses or instead aim for more economic damage than outright city conquest. I hope to see and hear of many epic siege battles deciding the fate of empires on the brink of destruction or victory. Don’t forget to lock your gates when you get to play Age of Wonders 4!


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