Age of Wonders 4 News

Hello everyone and welcome to today’s development diary about Narrative Events. I am Jakob (@Eomolch) from Triumph’s narrative team and I’ll be picking up where my colleague Michelle (@MichelleTriumph) left off two weeks ago with her more lore and story focused journal.

[h2]Introduction[/h2]
In a wider sense Narrative Events have been a part of the Age of Wonders series ever since the original Age of Wonders. Back in AoW 1-3 they came as a dialogue based message system, which would feature some plot-defining choices and was generally restricted to the campaign mode of the game. Then, in Planetfall, Anomalous Sites made an appearance bringing dungeon crawling options with branching story and outcome to randomly generated maps. Now, for Age of Wonders 4, we have developed a system that unifies our interactive narrative content in one framework to bring Narrative Events to Story Realms and regular Realms (sandbox sessions) alike.

• On a content level, a single Narrative Event is a mini-story presented to the player, followed by different options to react to the situation at hand, where each option will (typically) result in a different outcome in terms of gameplay consequences.
  
• On a system level however, the flow of Narrative Events is uniquely tailored towards the player and their faction, analyzing the player situation, factoring in player actions and choices, with each Narrative Event becoming part of the player’s personal narrative.
  
• Lastly, on a gameplay level, Narrative Events will provide meaningful choices to the player, through trade-offs that connect game play systems which normally would not interact with each other and unique rewards that can give a player tools outside their core strategy. When a moral dilemma is at odds with an economic one, many a benevolent Godir has been lured on the path of evil in this fourth Age of Wonders…
  

[h2]Event Format[/h2]


When it comes to the presentation of our Narrative Events, our art and UI team has blessed us with beautiful scenes in which one (or sometimes multiple) of our event actors are getting rendered in 3D. Those scenes are dynamic and will adjust to the locations, structures or factions involved. Ambient sounds, occasional weather effects and music tracks invite the player into a rich, living game world.

Transparency and player information are of high importance in a strategy game like ours. Therefore our event options give a full tooltip breakdown of all the gameplay effects that will happen when a button is clicked. This is complemented by tooltip (in tooltip) information for gameplay entities, concepts and lore, allowing players to make well-informed decisions within our events.

Inspecting the player city Centerspike through tooltips

[h2]Event Types and Conditions[/h2]
Our Narrative Events come in many different types and flavors, and can be categorized in different ways. From a player perspective an intuitive way to sort them is by assigning them to the following three groups:

[h3]Type 1: Exploration Events[/h3]

These are all events that will happen as a direct response to a player army movement, be it due to gaining vision of an unknown faction or an encounter with another army on the map. They promote exploration and give a narrative context to the locations, factions and armies you find on the map.

The guards of Dawnspire need a break.

The above example is an encounter with a Free City army guarding a resource node. It allows the player to peacefully take over the structure, while also giving room for special interactions (here, hiring some of the guards) or a surprise attack.

This is only one archetype of exploration events we have in the game, others include army surrenders, Free City diplomatic meet events and our dungeon exploration events when entering an Ancient Wonder (which will be looked at in their own dev diary later on :) ).

[h3]Type 2: Emergent Events[/h3]

These events always happen at the start of the player's turn. They are diverse in their theme, actors and options and will come with a sense of surprise to the player, though the narrative will provide a context and usually leave some clues why the particular event is happening.

Each Narrative Event within the pool of events the player may receive comes with a custom set of conditions and settings, reflecting on the player situation, but also the general state of the map and factions present. They are managed by what we call our Story Flow System, which provides the player with a steady stream of narrative events in a controlled and fair fashion. Fairness and balance is of importance since our narrative events are given to AI players and are active in multiplayer mode too. Naturally, with an inherently random system such as this one, some RNG with lucky or unlucky event picks for a particular player will still happen. But we have paid much attention to event reward and cost balancing and scaling, as well as the scope and frequency of narrative events, to ensure that the system integrates well into the competitive strategy game that is Age of Wonders 4.

This event may happen for a city with a strong military focus.

[h3]Type 3: Quests[/h3]

The two event types we discussed so far were all instant in their resolution and consequences (even if some of those consequences may have a longer lasting effect). Quests as the third type give the player a task to complete within a given time and are presented in the same format with a Narrative Event starting and ending the quest. Just like regular events, quests may be offered to the player from different types of sources including Free Cities, heroes or the player’s own population (cities). We have 7 archetypes of quest objectives in the main game, ranging from standard “defeat this army” quests to diplomatic quests to improve the standing with a Free City. (More types of objectives may be encountered in our story missions ;))

A hero asks for the broken weapon of his kin to be reforged.

In the above example, the player is asked to obtain a Magic Material, which are special resource nodes on the map that the player may connect to their cities for unique empire buffs. The quest already foreshadows the rewards that will be given to the player upon completion. However the exact rewards are not revealed to not undermine the narrative with spoilers. The “Mystery Bonus” is what the player will pick in the completion event of the quest.

Quest completions are set up as “pick your own reward” events.

[h2]Roleplaying Event Choices[/h2]
Role-playing is an important part of Age of Wonders 4. What starts with faction creation, ruler customization and continues in game with tome picks and empire building is also complemented by narrative event choices that will suit different types of characters.

To support this we have different types of choice options in our Narrative Events. On the one hand there are good and evil deeds that inform the alignment of the player. The most extreme ones of those will only be available if you are already at a certain level of good or evil alignment and will otherwise be hidden.

On the other hand we have Affinity Checks, where the player ruler attempts to channel their magical skill in order to resolve a problem. They are similar to pen and paper roleplaying actions, where a challenge level and dice roll are compared to the stat of a character, only that in our game the affinity scores of the player empire are used instead.

• Affinity Checks are hidden until the player empire has a high enough matching affinity (namely it must be as high as the challenge level of the check)
  
• They are the only options in our events with a random chance attached. Still you can see beforehand the results of each possible outcome within the button tooltip.
  
• The success chance is 50% when the affinity score equals the challenge level
  
• Each affinity point on top will increase the chances of success by 10% (yes, this means guaranteed success is possible)
  
• A lower success chance than 50% is not possible (then the option is still hidden)
  
• Next to the gameplay effects, there are short narrative snippets within the tooltip that provide further context to what will happen with each outcome.
  
• Affinity Checks are marked with a matching button icon, so they may easily be spotted when they are unlocked.
  
• Failing an affinity check will always result in the player ruler temporarily losing affinity points of the involved affinity.
  

Negotiations with toads. Time to find the right antidote…

There are some other affinity informed options that do not involve affinity checks, but we will leave those to be explored within the game itself.

[h2]Dynamic Text[/h2]

Attentive readers of this dev diary will have noticed the many underlined text snippets within the narrative text and tooltips.



As can be seen above those underlined words indicate that a tooltip (in tooltip) is available, but it also gives a hint to the amount of dynamic text present in our Narrative Events. Dynamic means that the exact text is dependent on the specific context of the event instance when the Narrative Event is shown to the player. In the screenshot above this is the Free City name and the name of its Lord or Lady, but there could be other qualities derived from gameplay entities: titles, unit names, hero items, world map structures, etc… They are needed to keep up with the procedural nature of our game and promote replayability by giving variation to the same base event in different instances. Remember the quest about the shattered Chaos Orb? In another playthrough it may be about a Sword instead and in yet another about a famous Axe.

Normally dynamic text insertions cause all kinds of linguistic problems, starting with gendered text when the grammatical gender of the inserted words asks for different text versions - pronouns, adjectives, articles, all may change with what we insert and this gets amplified once texts are being translated (or localized as we say) into other languages. Often this means that the writing needs to adhere to many additional restrictions, the quality of translations will suffer or that inserting this many derived text entries is simply not possible (without breaking grammar).

However for Age of Wonders 4 we could secure the service of the Lingoona Grammar module and integrate it into our own pipeline. It is a linguistic engine that is made for supporting text variable insertions, parsing our text and making it conform with the correct grammar as long as we use its syntax where needed and annotate all text insertions properly. As a brief example of what this actually means let us look at the following sentence from a Narrative Event:



It contains two inserted text entries (a hero (blue) and the player leader title(yellow)) and several pronoun (red) references to the hero. In the source text this looks like that:



As can be seen EventHero and PlayerLeader are both stored as variables in this Narrative Event. Using a mix of our own custom markup and the lingoona markup syntax then lets this source text be parsed in what could be seen above. (What is not visible here is that hero names and leader titles that may be inserted here all have annotations added to their string as well!)

[h2]Event Scripting [/h2]

Following up with some more tech, we can take a brief look at how our Narrative Events are set up under the hood. Generally speaking they are managed through our Resource Editor, which is our primary development tool for non-art asset content and system settings of the game. What makes the Narrative Events different from regular resource types is that they are heavily entwined with scripts. For this we have taken the Trigger System from Planetfall and pushed it to the next level.

The Trigger System is a modular high level scripting language that comes with a visual interface and lets us combine and instantiate the building blocks provided by our gameplay programmers to read and interact with the game and the state of a player getting the narrative event. At the core the scripting blocks are divided into four types:

• Events
  These are the trigger moments that make the game evaluate the script.
  
• Setups
  These are the variables created and stored as context of the script.
  (These may also contain conditions further defining the variable content.)
  
• Conditions
  The conditions that must be fulfilled for the script to be valid and execute its actions.
  
• Actions
  The changes the script makes to the game or player UX.
  

A sample narrative event script at its highest level. More actions and conditions are attached to the individual button options of the narrative event.

The first layer of a variable creation script - all input fields are further defined in deeper layers of the script.

The trigger system is a very powerful tool, which includes many goodies you would expect from a simple programming language, such as core logical and mathematical operators, if/then statements and loops. It also allows the creation of Macros, which may be called in other scripts (or Macros ;-)) and are a vital boon for keeping our narrative event content consistent and maintainable.

For the community perhaps the greatest advantage of our narrative event setup (and part of the reason to make a more implementation focused detour in this dev diary) is that they will be fully moddable when the game comes out, as they are contained within the Resource Editor. This means that it will be possible to mod in new narrative events, also ones that completely deviate from the event content we developers have created. A fair warning that this will involve a quite steep learning curve, but I know by experience that the Age of Wonders modding community has very dedicated and talented members among them, who do not fear challenges like this one.

[h2]Conclusion[/h2]

To reflect a bit on what we have read in this dev diary, it can be said from a developer perspective that with the Narrative Event framework and their surrounding systems we have created a powerful narrative tool, which has enough robustness and flexibility to support any narrative ambitions we (will) have for the ongoing development and support of the game.

From a player perspective, the Narrative Events we created will lead to personal stories and immersion within the gameworld that is more tangible and player agency driven than ever before within an Age of Wonders game. Where previous Age of Wonders excelled at bespoke Campaign storytelling, the Narrative Events are set up to give previous campaign players an intriguing experience in all modes of our game, not just the Story Realms.

I thank you all for reading my dev diary :)

Best regards, Eomolch

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https://store.steampowered.com/app/1669000/Age_of_Wonders_4/

Hello everyone, my name’s Tom Bird and I’m a senior developer at Triumph Studios. In today's Dev Diary, we will create our own faction — classical Dwarfs. We will also have a deeper look into the Forms and traits they can have. Together with Lennart I've recorded a special gameplay video where we take these for a spin in game. Check it out!

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

In the stream, my mission was to make classical Dwarves, as tropey as I could, so the Materium focus was a no brainer. Materium is all about the physical world, and how to manipulate it, it focuses on physical damage, though there is some fire later on when you start destroying sectors with volcanic eruptions!

[h3]The Industrious Culture[/h3]

The Materium culture is called Industrious, and it gives us a good starting point:



Industrious armies sacrifice mobility for defensive power, and generally work best when they let the enemy come to them.



The Anvil Guard is the starting front line unit. It has very high defense making him very resilient against physical attacks, and can taunt enemies to force them to target him.

Like all Industrious units, he has the Bolstering passive:

Bolstering

• Unit gains Bolstered Defense when it sustains damage. This works once per turn.
  

Bolstered Defense increases our resistance to physical damage, so this means that the more people who hit him, the tougher he gets!



The Arbalest is our other starting unit. She can only fire once per turn, and her default attack does low damage. Her main strength comes from her Overdraw attack, which she can only use if she hasn’t moved during her turn. This means that she’s best placed behind the shield wall waiting for enemies to come to her.



The Steelshaper is our support unit. Unlike most other support units, she does physical damage with her main attack, meaning Industrious units have no native way of applying non-physical damage. Her main strength is her Grant Defense ability, which allows her to add more stacks of Bolstered Defense to any nearby ally.

This can then be combined with Strength from Steel, which lets her convert those stacks of Bolstered Defense (as well as any gained from the Bolstering passive) into healing power and stacks of Strengthened to increase the unit’s damage!



The Halberdier is our polearm unit, who sacrifices some defensive power for retaliation runes that reflect damage back on melee attackers. Typically you want this guy on the very front line, with a Shield unit in defense mode next to him, to boost his defenses.



Not actually shown on the stream (I forgot to build them!) is the Bastion, a shield specialist who replaces the Anvil Guard’s taunt for the Inspiring Defense passive:

Inspiring Defense

• When this unit enters defense mode, adjacent allies gain 1 stack of Bolstered Defense.
  

A couple of Bastions can easily stack big defensive buffs onto an army, which can then be converted by the Steelshapers into health.



The Industrious culture also has this useful spell, which lets you take all of that defense and convert it to Strengthened and Fortune stacks, giving a big boost to damage and critical chance!

[h3]Form and Traits[/h3]
As well as a culture, we also get to choose traits and a tome to define our new Dwarfy faction!
First we pick our form traits!



The default Body Trait for Dwarfkin is:

Tough

• +2 defense to all units
  

This means we’re more resistant to physical damage, however Industrious already has a lot of physical defense, so we can get rid of this. Our problem is more magical attacks! So we replace it with:

Resilient

• +3 status resistance
  

This helps our units resist status effects, such as being frozen or Sundered Defense, which could strip away the Bolstered Resistance that our units rely on.

The default Mind Traits for Dwarfkin is:

Defensive Tactics

• Gains a non-stacking bonus of +1 defense and +1 resistance when adjacent to another unit with this passive.
  

So we take less damage in close formations. Since Industrious rely a lot on Shield Units, who can use their defense mode to protect adjacent allies, this is a very strong choice. However, we are Dwarves who live beneath the ground, so we replace it with:

Underground Adaptation

• Units move faster underground. Also cities can build farms underground for more food, and the faction starts with the Excavation ability.
  

So we give up a powerful combat bonus, for a powerful economic one!

[h3]Society Traits[/h3]
As well as traits for our form, we can also choose traits that shape our society! These traits are associated with affinities, and since we’re using the Materium affinity for our culture, it feels appropriate to pick traits from that affinity as well!



Great Builders is just so Dwarfy that it simply has to be chosen. Although we can build farms underground, quarries are also very useful and being able to get gold from them can be worth a lot of money which we’ll need for our armies.

Special Province improvements allow us to replace our boring old quarries and farms with Golem Enhanced Mines and Runecarver Encampments that generate extra resources, so having more of these is always useful!

Finally, starting with a workshop and walls will give a nice early boost to our city's economy as well as keeping us a bit safer to boot!



Runesmiths was our other choice, a trait that supercharges our ability to deploy Unit Enchantments - powerful spells that grant bonuses to our troops. We will be able to research these faster and they will cost less mana for us to sustain, which given that upkeep is the major limiter in game of army size is a very valuable bonus!

As a happy coincidence, it also gives a bonus to our shield and polearm units, both of which we will be deploying en masse!

[h3]Tomes of Magic
[/h3]
The next big decision of our build is what tome we should choose! Since I was still in all-materium-all-the-time, I settled for the Tome of Enchantment:



This tome is, unsurprisingly, specialized in deploying a lot of unit enchantments which synergizes nicely with our Runesmiths trait! It also has:

Spell Tempered Shields

• Shield units gain +1 resistance, and grant +1 resistance to allies when they enter defense mode.
  

This enchantment helps mitigate the biggest vulnerability that Industrious armies have - weakness to magical damage.

We also get:

Sundering Blades

• Melee units have a 60% chance to apply sundered defense to targets with their attacks
  

Sundered Defense means the target is more vulnerable to physical damage, which is handy since that’s the only sort of damage that Industrious units use!

Seeker Arrows

• Ranged Units gain +1 range on all attacks
  

This only affects our Arbalests right now (Ranged Unit is a type, so it doesn’t affect Support Units or Battle Mage Units who also have ranged attacks), but +1 range is very useful - Players going for archer heavy armies sometimes pick this tome just to get their hands on that enchantment!

Summon Animated Armor gets us this guy:



It’s a pretty normal Pikeman unit, not as good as our Industrious Halbardiers though it does have the advantage of being immune to status effects and morale. The main advantage though is that it is summoned instead of built in cities, making it much easier to deploy to locations away from our cities!

Awakened Tools

• The affected city loses 20 stability, but gains 20 production and draft while this spell is running.
  

This spell is particularly useful on newly founded cities, allowing them to quickly construct new buildings and units. We’re still limited by the gold cost of these things of course, and with larger cities the stability cost can be too high for this spell to be useful.

Runecarver’s Camp

• This Special Province improvement grants +15 draft to the city, and an additional +3 mana for each adjacent quarry. It counts as a quarry itself.
  

Normally you can only get mana from provinces by building conduits on mana nodes and magic materials, both of which are pretty rare, so the ability to get a bit more mana from our provinces is definitely helpful. Especially since it synergizes with Quarries, which our Great Builder’s trait has also granted gold income too!

[h3]Empire Tree[/h3]
Now that we’ve explained how we’ve made our Dwarf Faction, let’s have a quick look at some of the Empire Tree upgrades that we can take when we play with them!

When the game starts we’ve maxed out Materium, so we’ll be looking at that part of the tree.



Military Engineering is a nice pick to grab early in the game, it gives us an edge for claiming terrain in the early game. Also, if an outpost has a Palisade Wall, that wall will also be present if the outpost is upgraded to a city, helping us keep our new cities safe.



Our Great Builders trait lets us build Special Province Improvements faster, so taking Specialist Districts so that they also give us gold income makes a nice extra for us!



If we had some spare imperium, the Rite of the Armorer would give us a unique piece of master-crafted armor to give to our leader.



Obviously Dwarves should be masters of siege warfare, so this is a nice pickup for later in the game. Siege Projects can be very expensive!

[h3]The Future[/h3]
So what does the later game hold for our valiant Dwarves? I’ve already written too much, but I can show you a few glimpses of what’s available.



We can transform their skin to steel to protect us from physical damage and poisons.



The Tome of the Crucible lets us sweep whole provinces with Pyroclastic Flames and rain Meteors in combat.



The Golden Golem is the most powerful Polearm unit in the game, capable of turning it’s enemies into golden statues.

[hr][/hr]

And that’s it for this week. I hope you enjoyed this detailed look into how we designed our Dwarf faction and what they can do! Tune in next week to learn more about Narrative Events!

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https://store.steampowered.com/app/1669000/Age_of_Wonders_4/

Hello everyone, I'm Thomas Schuiten, the designer at Triumph Studios. Today in this dev diary I will give you some insight into the many Realms you can explore, and the Magehaven from which you do so.

The fourth Age of Wonders brings the return of the Wizard kings, but more than that, with the barriers between worlds torn open, many Realms are now within reach.

This new freedom calls for a different approach to Scenarios and maps than Age of Wonders has known in the past, and it's an excellent fit to build upon the lessons of Planetfall’s Empire Mode.



In this age you will form a Pantheon of god-like characters through your conquests. A Ruler may ascend to the Pantheon by conquering a Realm, from where they may join future conquests, or oppose them…



There will be more info on the Pantheon further down, but first we must choose a Realm to conquer.

[h2]Realms[/h2]


There are 3 kinds of Realm to choose from:

• Story Realms, with custom lore and story content that tells the story of the Fourth Age of Wonders and the return of the Godir,
  
• Challenge Realms, where an interesting set of traits is gathered together to give a unique Realm to be explored and conquered.
  
• Custom Realms, these are your own creations, making a custom Realm lets you pick Traits as you see fit to make something unexpected.
  

Each Realm is made up of various Realm Traits, these are divided into 5 types based on which aspect of the Realm they affect; Geography, Clime, Inhabitant, Presence and Miscellaneous (further referred to as Misc).
Each realm can feature 1 of each of these (except for Misc traits, of which a realm can have 4)

Geography Traits determine the shape of the world and can have a huge impact. This is where you find “Continents” and “Islands” map types, but also a few unique twists such as “Lava Divide” where the realm is roughly split in two by an ocean of impassable lava (only connected through the underground)



Clime Traits are next, and they modify the environment of the realm, making certain climes more or less likely to appear.If you want a desert realm or a frozen wasteland this is where you can find it. (Or if you want some real chaos you can choose Forming Realm and watch the world form around you as you build your empire)



Inhabitant Traits affect the prevalence of particular creature types on that Realm as well as certain structures, perhaps left behind by the Realm’s previous inhabitants. This is where you can make the Realm dominated by undead creatures, or have enormous beasts stalking the wilderness.



Presence Traits add Empires to the realm that have special starting conditions and provide a unique challenge, for example the Pretender kings adds 3 kings with substantial kingdoms in the midst of a succession war.



Lastly there’s Misc Traits, these modify the rules of the game, or otherwise modify the realm in a manner that can be mixed and matched with any other trait. Want to make a realm where Free Cities are less common, leaving ruins instead to mark valuable locations? The Ruined Realm trait will do that.

When you’ve obtained some experience in the game, misc traits are where you find interesting twists to change up your play through, like with for example the Megacities trait.



[h2]Your Pantheon[/h2]
The Pantheon is where you collect your Ascended rulers, each ruler you complete a Realm with may ascend to your Pantheon, from where they may aid or hinder future conquests. It is also where you spend the Points you’ve earned with your Pantheon XP to unlock new customization options for your leaders!



During your conquests you gain Pantheon XP for completing certain actions, clearing infestations, conquering cities, defeating players and gaining vassals are just some examples. Completing a Realm through victory, defeat or by abandoning it adds this XP to your Pantheon and gives you Points with which to unlock new items in the Pantheon tree.



These include hats and cloaks as seen above, but also Leader origins and society traits that will add new options to your empire creation.

As you gain Pantheon XP you will also unlock new Realms to explore, each bringing a unique Presence trait to the table that you may then use in your own custom realms as well.





I hope you enjoyed this introduction to the Realm and Pantheon system, there is much to be explored and experimented with. I look forward to seeing the Realms that you create and reading the stories of your conquests!

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https://store.steampowered.com/app/1669000/Age_of_Wonders_4/

Hi everyone and welcome to a new Dev Diary about Story and Lore!

I’m Michelle, a narrative designer at Triumph, and today I’d like to talk about the narrative in Age of Wonders 4. Our internal narrative team consists of me and Jakob. The contents of this game were created together with several external writers, including Raymond Bingham, who has played a role in the games since the beginning of the Age of Wonders.

[h3]First of all, a (light) spoiler warning!
We will talk about the story of Age of Wonders 4. If you want to go in blind, I suggest you stop reading here![/h3]

[h2]Narrative in Age of Wonders 4[/h2]

The story and world-building have always been a pillar of the Age of Wonders games. Every game was filled with strong characters, expansive back-stories and loads of lore to enjoy. The same counts for Age of Wonders 4, in which we use new systems to allow the player to immerse themselves in their own story as rulers and creators of their empires and people.

With each successive iteration of Age of Wonders, we have added more gameplay depth and more immersive ways for players to roleplay the ruler of a fantasy realm. This has its effect on our approach to narrative: Instead of having a fully scripted campaign story that the player follows - with perhaps a couple of branches - the in-game narrative needs ways to adapt to who the player is and their actions. Through this we avoid narrative vs gameplay disconnects, difficulty spikes or blocking parts of the customization/empire development possibilities.

So our goal is to create a universe rich in lore, which reacts to the player’s choices instead of a more linear traditional scripted adventure.

This requirement led us to develop a new Narrative Event System which confronts your ruler with quests, leadership dilemmas, and boons coming from your empire, the larger world, or the cosmic affinities. The system is able to render scenes with animated 3D characters and provide multiple-choice options. We’ll foreshadow this system in this journal, in one of the following journals Jakob will go in-depth!

This Journal will focus on the following

• The premise and expansion to the Age of Wonders Universe
  
• How lore is integrated into the game
  
• The Story Realms in Age of Wonders 4
  
• But first, a trip down memory lane.
  

[h2]Previously in Age of Wonders…[/h2]

As you may remember, during Age of Wonders 3, the high elf Sundren and human Edward banded together to found the Torchbearers: an initiative to bring the people of Athla together against the Shadowborn. The Shadowborn was a conniving cult who aimed to sow dissent and destroy the Seals that protected Athla from the greater magics beyond. The Torchbearer heroes stopped a war between the kingdom of the High Elves and the Empire of the Commonwealth, but they could not stop the Shadowborn from destroying the Seals.

The Shadowborn broke the Seals on Athla, allowing ancient powers to return.

The magic that Athla had been protected from for many years, flooded back in. Elemental forces were distorted, climates changed, and the great empires of Athla fell.

Through the cataclysms, the Valley of Wonders remained.

Age of Wonders 4’s story starts here, on Athla, where we follow a mortal champion who finds themselves ascending to Godirhood. But they will quickly meet the Wizard Kings of old, who return to reclaim the lands they were banished from… And thus the Rise of the Godir, the main storyline, commences.

Wizard Kings of old return to reclaim Athla.

When Wizards like Yaka, Karissa, and Nimue left Athla to find fame and riches in the Shadow Realm, they did not expect Merlin to Seal away their only chance of returning. Stuck in a void between realms the Wizards were subjected to terrible visions and maddening voices, confronting them with their biggest fears and ambitions. The Torment of Shadows, as they called it, left them scarred and warped. Some souls who succumb to this torment are lost, forced to wander the void forever. Many dangers lay beyond Athla… yet some claimed new domains, creating their own followers and bending faraway realms to their will.

Pictured here is a Lost Mage unit, a wizard that succumbed to the torments in the Astral Sea. The breaking of seals between worlds set these monstrosities free and they can be found around places of high magical potency.

[h2]The Astral Sea[/h2]
There have always been hints to worlds beyond Athla within the Age of Wonders lore. In Shadow Magic, one of these other worlds became very real, with the invasion of the Shadow Demons from the Shadow Realm. All of these worlds are connected through the Astral Sea, a vast ethereal ocean where magic ebbs and flows, influencing all worlds drifting within.

In Age of Wonders 4 the premise and structure of the game allow us to make the many unknown worlds not the distant origin of invading forces, but places to explore. You can visit the homeworld of fiends and demons, explore the origin of the elves, and of course, claim a realm for yourself. The Astral Sea is vast and filled with many wonders, creatures and dangers. An entire universe awaits you!

The Astral Sea is filled with many wonders, creatures, and dangers.

[h2]The Godir Pantheon[/h2]
Through their connection to the Astral Sea, ascended Mortal Champions and powerful Wizards alike find themselves blessed (or cursed) with unforetold powers. They are Godir, god-like beings, who can travel the worlds and can even use the forces of Creation to create their own followers.

All these Godir, regardless of their alliances or morality, are part of the grand Pantheon of the Astral Sea. The Godir of the Pantheon are quarrelsome, and alliances between them are formed and broken easily. The most outspoken alliances within the Pantheon are the lawful Covenant, which opposes the conniving Shad’rai.

Every new Ruler who leaves their mark on a realm can become a member of your Pantheon!

[h2]Welcome to Magehaven…[/h2]
All Godir find themselves in Magehaven at one point or another. Magehaven is a world in the Astral Sea where the Pantheon of Godir holds its most important forum of dispute and council. It is protected by an unbreakable spell, which prevents any harm from being done to a living creature or soul. Therefore even the fiercest enemies can meet there to negotiate their conflicts. Among the many wonders of Magehaven are the World Gates, which act as magic portals through the Astral Sea and allow ambitious Godir to explore new realms.

Welcome to Magehaven!

[h2]Story Realms[/h2]
The Astral Sea features many worlds to explore and conquer. Each world plays its bigger or smaller role in the various intertwining conflicts and stories of the Fourth Age.

The realms that play a bigger role are called Story Realms. The main game features five Story Realms at launch in a storyline called Rise of the Godir, which will let players immerse deeper into the lore and get a better understanding of the Age of Wonders Universe.

All Story Realms feature voice-acted briefing and debriefing scenes with bespoke art, and we use Narrative Events - described in more detail below - as the engine through which the story is told. And you will find that characters from the earlier games make their (in)glorious return.

All Story Realms feature voice-acted briefing and debriefing scenes.

Your adventure starts on Athla, where you will experience the return of an old threat. Only your ascendance to powers larger than life may save your people from what awaits beyond the World Gates. And even that is only the beginning, for a grand plot unfolds in Magehaven, defining the fate of all Godir within the Astral Sea.

Welcome to the Valley, o King!


[h2]Lore[/h2]
The new nifty Tooltip system allows us to put in lore in any location, without breaking the gameplay flow. To differentiate lore tooltips from gameplay tooltips, they are rendered in a parchment style. Simply hover over an underlined word to learn more about the Astral Sea and the creatures within! As with regular tooltips they support nested “tooltip in tooltip” functionality.

Lore and backstories about characters, Tomes, Ancient Wonders, and other secrets of the Astral Sea can be explored in-game.

Lore can be found in-game in Events and descriptions.

[h2]Narrative Events[/h2]
A lot of our narrative efforts when making Age of Wonders 4 went into the creation of a new dynamic event system and its content. The new Narrative Events provide a framework for telling stories that emerge from the world and the actions of the player. On a structural level, they connect gameplay systems that normally may not have direct interactions, leading to interesting decisions and unique opportunities. On a narrative level, they make the worlds that the player Godir visits come alive, provide meaningful roleplaying options, and make the experience more tangible when they zoom in on the backstory, problems, and motivations of heroes, cities, or monsters dwelling inside a dungeon.

We will look at the involved mechanics and surrounding systems of the event system more in-depth in a future dev diary, but as a glimpse at what the Narrative Events can entail we will take a brief look at the event below:

What is the price of zeal within a faith-based empire?

The above Narrative Event may be encountered by players who have erected an empire deeply entwined with the order affinity. By invoking a strong sense of faith within their population they are attracting fanatics, eager to impose harsher rules to further consolidate their vision of a perfect theocracy. – Will the player capitalize on their zeal? Or will they forego their extreme measures and protect the common people?

With the combination of rich Lore, Dynamic Narrative Events that react to your choices, and carefully scripted Story Realms, we aim to bring a more immersive experience to you than ever before!

Stay tuned for a new dev diary next week as we are going to talk about Magehaven, Pantheon and Realm Setup! Also, consider adding the game to the Wishlist!

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Hello Everyone!

My name is Tom Bird, and I’m a senior developer at Triumph Studios. Today I’d like to talk about affinities, one of the systems that sits at the heart of Age of Wonders 4. Each affinity represents an archetypal, cosmic force that defines the type of magic you can use, the elemental forces you control and the type of society your faction has.

There are 6 affinities in the game, but today we’re mostly going to be talking about Order affinity. Order is the power that brings structure to the Cosmos and to the lives of mortals. It is associated with light, faith, justice and the government of empires. In gameplay terms, Order has a focus on diplomacy, healing and city stability.

[h2]Culture[/h2]
You first start defining your faction’s affinity by choosing your culture and society traits.Your faction’s culture represents who they are before you take control of them, and mostly affects your starting units. There are 6 cultures in the game and the one most strongly associated with Order is High Culture.



Here we see some High Culture elves, standing in the Magehaven, preparing to tread onto a new world!

Order is associated with Spirit Damage, a type of holy energy that is particularly effective against the undead. High Culture’s defining feature is that their units can become “Awakened”, allowing them to channel Spirit Damage through their physical attacks!

[h2]Society Traits[/h2]
After choosing your culture, it’s time to choose Society Traits. These traits represent the general philosophy your people follow, as well as how they live and govern themselves. Each of these traits is associated with an affinity, and I’ve listed a couple of the order traits below.



The Chosen Uniters trait is the epitome of Order as a force for diplomacy. It grants you 10 points of good alignment, which improves your diplomatic relations with the other (non-evil) factions that you meet, and grants you a bonus to income from Vassals, which are cities that join your empire via diplomacy instead of conquest.



Of course, Order isn’t always about being nice to people! The Imperialists trait represents Order as a force of political and economic domination. It grants a bonus to Imperium income, which is vital for building an empire with many cities, as well as buying skills from the Empire Tree.


[h2]Tomes[/h2]
The final, and most important, aspect of your faction’s affinity are the Tomes of Magic which you choose to research. Each Tome contains a number of spells, units and upgrades all centered around a particular theme, and each Tome is associated with one affinity.

There are 9 Tomes of Order in Age of Wonders 4, leading your empire down a path of righteous and lawful domination.



The Tome of Faith is an early game tome that is focused on healing and support units. It’s perfect for a religious faction that wishes to shield its armies with holy power!



The Chaplain is a powerful healing unit who can Bless units to boost their combat prowess.



If you’re more interested in using your Culture’s own support units, then the Staves of Mending enchantment will grant them extra healing powers, as well as making them cheaper to support.



The Convent is a unique structure you can build in your city that provides benefits that grow more powerful the more content and happy you keep your citizens.



Focussed on the more repressive aspects of Order, the Tome of Subjugation is a mid game tome focused on the domination and control of other races.


The Tyrant Knight is a powerful shock unit, who specializes in delivering a devastating charge that shatters enemy morale.


Once an enemy has been routed, the Final Ultimatum spell gives you a chance to convince a fleeing unit that their lives would be better if they switched sides.


The Baron’s Palace gives a huge amount of income for a city structure, however it can only be built in the cities that you have conquered from your foes.

[h2]The Empire Tree
[/h2]Until know, every choice we’ve made has granted affinity points to out faction, if we’d made a starting faction on High Elf Imperialists, we’d end up with:

• High Culture: +2 Order
  
• Imperialists: +1 Order
  
• Chosen Uniters: +1 Order
  
• Tome of Faith: +2 Order
  

That gives us a start with 6 Order. So what does that mean to us? Well, one system that is greatly affected by your faction’s affinity is the Empire Tree:


The Empire Tree contains the economic and social bonuses of the game (as opposed to Tomes which are more focused on military bonuses), and is divided into 7 branches: One branch for each of the six affinities, and one general shared branch.

Since our faction has 6 Order affinity, we will start rapidly unlocking skills from the Order branch of the tree (as well as the general branch) but we won’t be able to get anything from any other branches unless we get some other affinities!

The Order branch of the tree is focused heavily on diplomacy and vassals, giving you such skills as:



A Whispering Stone is a magical stone you give to a free city to help sway it to your side, since most empires only have one, this allows us to try and vassalize twice as many cities at once!


The Rally of Lieges is a mechanic that allows you to recruit units directly from your vassals and ancient wonders. This skill means any unit you recruit via the rally starts as an experienced veteran with extra health and other bonuses.

Also, as you can see this skill will take us 10 turns to unlock. If we had fewer points in Order affinity, this would take longer!


As well as permanent upgrades, the tree also contains Rites, which are one off rewards you can trigger to help you out of a tough spot or to optimize a particular plan. This rite grants you a friendship boost with every free city on the map, helping you vassalize them faster.

Of course we don’t expect the player to stick to just one affinity, by mixing and matching affinities you can find synergies to help supercharge your empire! For example, Shadow affinity has many skills themed around deception and the darker sides of diplomacy.

This means that, once we’ve done enough research into our starting tome, we could pick a Shadow Tome, such as the Tome of Souls to add a religious death cult feel to our faction. This would give us 2 points of shadow affinity that would allow us to get skill such as this:



This skill would allow us to use our extra whispering stones to speed up our magical research and keep an eye on distant lands!

[h2]Conclusion[/h2]
This concludes our brief introduction to the affinity system! There’s a lot more to talk about here, your affinity also affects your diplomatic relations with others and your access to the Magical Victory Condition, but that will all have to wait until a future dev diary!

Next Diary will feature more details about Lore and Story Realms — stay tuned!

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