Hello everyone!
My name is Tom and I’m the Game Director of Age of Wonders 4. Today I’m going to write about a new free feature coming in the Griffon update that releases at the same time as Archon Prophecy: Extra Faction Data!
When we first designed the faction creation system, the idea was that you would design a ruler and their followers at the start of their journey, after all the game itself existed to tell the rest of their story. This is fine if you are controlling your faction, but what if the AI is controlling it? The AI would not understand your fantasy and wouldn’t respect your goals, leading to results that could be jarring and unsatisfying.
To fix this we’ve extended the Faction Editor so you can fill in much more information, both to inform the AI how to control your character but also to smooth out how you play the character as well!
It all starts on the last page of faction creation, where you can name your ruler and give your faction a biography:
Clicking on Advanced Settings brings us to a new screen where we can flesh out the story of our faction even further (as well as letting us set the AI personality).
Our first stop is the City Names screen where we can supply a list of names for our faction to use:
I can enter up to 15 names, and any new cities the faction builds (either by myself or the AI) will pick from this list, in order from top to bottom. This means you can guarantee that the important city names are picked first as well as providing some backup names to use once those have all been picked.
Heroes is next on the list!
As before I have a list of heroes I can create - these heroes will appear in list order in the recruitment screen, 3 at a time, before showing you the RNG heroes that the system automatically generates for you.
When editing a hero you have control over how they both look and operate, letting you choose their class, loadout, ambition and governor type. The only limitation is that heroes are limited to using the default loadouts for the culture, they can’t use special equipment unlocked from the pantheon.
There’s also a biography area, so you can add a narrative that ties the hero into the faction’s story!
The final screen of the system is the AI tome path, unlike the other screens this has no impact if you play as the faction, it only controls how the AI works with the faction.
In this screen you can control which tomes the AI will pick and in which order. The system tracks your affinity as you go, to ensure you can only pick tomes that you’ve unlocked.
You can specify as many tomes as you wish, once the AI reaches the end of your list it will fall back onto its normal behavior where it picks tomes based on the faction’s personality type.
Finally, if you’re playing on PC, we’ve been working on a way for you to export your rulers into the modding tools so you can share them with the community, either as stand alone rulers or as part of a story realm you create! We’ll update our modding guide with instructions when the update is released.
Extra Faction Data will be released as part of the free Griffon update on August 12th along with Archon Prophecy, our 7th DLC release. We hope to see you then!
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