Avis sur Age of Wonders 4

Best AoW in the serie by far. The sheer amount of possibilities when mix and matching racial traits, cultures, tomes, and so modifiers for your custom little fantasy race is just too good to be true. Hero development has been made far more interesting since a recent major overhaul of the system, even if it could be taken a step further: all your class types tend to be built the same over time. Battles are good, a bit long when you have 3 stacks of units to manage - and you should, group battle gives you a big advantage in combat. Endless replayability, with the nice extra touch of unlocking some stuff after a game. Keeps you entertained while playing single maps (there's a campaign but it's really just a few maps chained together) The game is really generous in terms of content and surprises, you can discover new things for a long time.

The game is fun in solo. The multiplayer does not work. It's not a network issue or anything, the game is literally not functioning in multiplayer. I invested time in this game for the explicite purpose of playing with my brother, and we were flabbergasted to discover that. Alright, so how is that even possible ? Contrary to most 4X, where you can decide to focus on some or all aspects of the game, Age of Wonders 4 is a combat driven game, there is only one main focus. Your army is quite literally your economy, the fights bring in way more resources than what your whole empire can ever hope to produce, and the city management is clearly secondary and basic. And all of that is fine, it's ok to create a game where the main activity is dragons fightings ice mages fighting ninjas, why not. What is unacceptable is stopping the whole game when anyone is fighting, because apparently the devs couldn't figure out how to make multiple fights happen at the same time. Contrary to, say, Endless Legend, where players do their things simultaneously, except when their are specifically fighting each other, here in Age of Wonders THE WHOLE GAME STOPS every time someone fights. And players are going to fight a lot : that's the whole point of the game. You have three choices for fights, and all three are bad. The first two are : every time a fight happens, everyone else has either a black screen or can spectate the fight. Which means in a 2 players game you're going to do nothing 50% of the time, and in a 4 players game you do nothing 75% of the time. That is of course insane, and nobody will ever want to play like that. The third choice is : another human player takes control of the enemy units. But that is completely broken, as players don't play the same way as the AI, which is mediocre at best. So your early game becomes absurdly difficult if the other players are even remotely decent. Or, you can ask them to do nothing with the neutral monsters and kill them without difficulty ... but that is also quite dumb and uninteresting. Now, you're going to hear a vocal minority of players saying "But bro, just auto-combat every combat !". But ... no ? Firstly, the only gameplay IS the combat. So I'm not going to skip every combat, that's the opposite of what you would want to do. It's like playing counter strike but the actual gunfights are resolved automatically ? Or playing Civilization, but you don't choose what to build or where units go ? That's completely insane. Secondly, the AI is not very good, and loses units all the time. Apparently the only line of code for, let's say, shock units, is : "Move forward as much at possible, every turn", and that's it. I can't really call it an artificial "intelligence", it's just an "If ... then" list that does a really bad job at fighting. And thirdly, MOST STRATEGY do not work in auto-combat. Unit capacities are never used, for instance, so your faction of tiger-summoning dudes are never going to summon anything, and will die to level 1 bandits. Spells are never cast, so your faction of spell-boosting mages that focus on helping your leader deliver devastating fireball will instead march forward to heir death or just do nothing, and your leader will not actually cast any relevant fireball in auto-combat. I would say that more than 80% of factions and strategies do not function in auto-combat. Auto-resolving everything to make multiplayer somewhat bearable is complete nonsense. So I really do not recommend this game, the multiplayer aspect is a lie and I can't ask for a refund because I spent to much time in it. Why they didn't just code the game like every other similar game where players can play simultaneously is beyond me.