Hello everyone! My name is Tom Bird, and I’m the game director for Age of Wonders 4. Today I want to talk about some of the big changes that are coming in the next Scorpion Update! This is a free update, released with the new Rise from Ruin culture pack on March 9th.
Resistance/Defense Rework
The original design for unit defense/resistance was taken from Age of Wonders 3:
Defense reduces damage on the physical channel
Resistance reduces damage on the non-physical channels (ice, fire, etc)
While this worked fine in that game, the enchantment system raised an issue in Age of Wonders 4 that we hadn’t anticipated - as the game went on enchantments started replacing more and more physical damage with magical damage. So at the start of the game, your warriors might do 12 physical damage, but at the end of the game it may do 6 physical damage, 4 blighted damage and 4 fire damage.
Piling enchantments can easily change a physical attack into a magical attack by the end of the game.
This led to several issues:
Defense is more useful in the early game, and resistance is more useful in the late game. Since players often optimize for the late game, defense was considered less valuable overall.
Shield units, who rely on Defense to stay alive, couldn’t really do their job late game, since most attacks bypassed that defense and could kill them anyways.
Battle Mages became less useful, since everyone can do magical damage
The last 2 points were particularly painful, since having distinct and useful unit roles is an important factor in making combat feel consistent and easy to read.
In order to fix the issue we decided to redesign the stats so that instead of looking at the type of damage an attack did, we would instead look at the type of the attack itself:
Defense reduces damage from abilities with the Melee and Physical Ranged tags
Resistance reduces damage from spells and abilities with the Magic tag
This means that it doesn’t matter what enchantments you put onto your archers, their attacks remain Physical Ranged, and are entirely blocked by the Defense stat. Since shield units have high defense, archer units will always do poorly against them, which was the intention from the original design we made when we started to make the game!
Of course, when we made a change this big in a core system, complete havoc ensued and we had to make changes all over the place to make sure all the various bonuses, units and spells in the game still worked properly. For example:
We rebalanced defense/resistance across the board
The general goal we wanted to achieve was that front line melee fighters would be easy to kill with magic and hard to kill with physical attacks, while magical units would be the opposite. So we went through the game’s units and tweaked their defense/resistance stats to make that happen. For example you will now see that:
Most shock, fighter and polearm units have 2 more points of defense than they have resistance
Most support units have 2 more points of resistance than they have defense
Most shield units have 5 more points of defense than they have resistance
Obviously there are variations here - Mystic culture units tend to have one more point of resistance for example - but in general now there is a clear reason to use a battle mage against a shield unit instead of an archer unit!
We added a Physical Protection stat (and renamed the Elemental Resistance stats)
Previously we didn’t need a separate stat for specifically reducing physical damage, since that was exactly what defense did. Since defense now worked on multiple damage channels, we needed to add it!
We also renamed all the Damage Type Resistance stats to Damage Type Protection, since we were concerned people would confuse the damage type stats and the actual resistance stat if they had the same name!
We added a Magic Fighter unit type
The final major issue we had was simply that magic damage was too rare - our testers realized that it was better to go all in on defense as a stat since so few of the units they faced could do magical damage. The fix for this was to create a new unit type, the Magic Fighter, who can do magic attacks but at melee range.
A bunch of existing units were converted to use the new type, such as:
Most elemental spirits
Wyverns
Corrupt Souls
The phoenix is another one of the units who got converted to the new type.
We then discovered that these units were really, really good at killing front line units, so we had to nerf them a bit. We also converted Dragons to do magic melee attacks, and then had to nerf them a bit after a wounded, unupgraded bone dragon managed to one shot a tier 1 shield unit by doing 118 damage in a single turn!
Unfortunately we didn’t have the opportunity to add magical melee attacks to heroes, since that would have involved making large updates to hero skill trees. This means among other things that Dragon Rulers still do non-magical melee attacks, unlike their non-ruler cousins.
Other things
We also made a ton of minor changes to form traits, enchantments and abilities to try and get the new system working properly. The end result is something we’re quite happy with - combat feels more tactical with the type of unit you choose to attack with having more relevance, and with most units having more clearly defined uses and weaknesses!
Unit Movement Rework
The idea that different units move at different speeds over the world map has been a core feature since the series began. It simply made sense that a mounted unit would move faster than a footsoldier, and the older games were balanced by giving the slower units other advantages such as lower costs and superior stats or simply by making faster units rare.
Age of Wonders 4 however gives players the ability to choose if certain units are mounted or not, as well as giving the player access to various special mounts that would boost a unit’s combat capabilities. This meant that in many cases, mounted units were not only faster than other units, they were flat out better!
This led to an issue because the ability move quickly over the world map is very strong:
You can clear more resource nodes in the same time period, letting you collect more rewards and giving you more resources to spend on making more armies to clear more nodes and get more rewards, and so on.
You can move armies back to defend your cities more easily, reducing dangers of invasion.
You can invade enemy domains faster, so it’s harder for them to respond.
The first point especially meant that many players would focus entirely on fielding only armies of mounted and flying creatures, to maximize their early game economies. One of the core goals of Age of Wonders 4 is to give players the freedom to make whatever faction they wish, so a mechanic that limited many players to only using a handful of units while also forcing them to always take a form trait for mounts was clearly working against that.
The solution was fairly simple - we would just give all units in the game the same number of movement points on the world map - 40, the same as normal cavalry. Fliers would have the same number of move points as cavalry who would have the same number of move points as infantry. This meant that your army composition didn’t matter as much, in most cases your army would move the same speed regardless!
Of course, we don’t want all these units to actually move the same everywhere since that wouldn’t make any sense, so:
Mounted units still move faster in combat than other units
Fliers and Floating units still move over difficult terrain faster than other unit types
Special abilities like Forest Walk and Swamp Walk still let some units move faster on certain terrain types
Also, Scout units still have more move points than every other unit type since they need them to do their job.
Of course we had to make a bunch of other changes to get this change to fit into the game properly, for example:
We rebalanced the cost of a lot of form traits
This mainly affected the cost of the mount traits, which were all reduced (except for the flying mounts, which are still considered good enough to keep their old cost). We also had to tweak Mount Masters and Athletics, since they were also considerably weaker after making this change.
We gave each unit a Combat Stat speed
The previous system had every unit have between 32 and 48 move points, with most hexes in combat costing 8 points to traverse. This was mainly done so units would have the same move points in and out of combat, even though it was unintuitive and annoying to parse. Since we no longer wanted units to have the same move speed in and out of combat, we gave each unit a combat speed stat that showed the number of hexes it could move in combat. If a unit has a combat speed of 4, it can move 4 hexes, simple!
We slowed down fliers on the world map
Giving fliers the same move points as other units was undermined somewhat by our discovery that fliers spent fewer move points than other units in pretty much every situation. Since we didn’t want players to only ever take builds with flying mounts, we had to fix this by slightly increasing the move cost of flying to match other movement types over flat terrain. A flier would still be faster over difficult terrain like forests and mountains, and can still fly over water without embarking, but for most types of movement it would be just as fast as any other unit.
After all this, we have a system where your armies move at a consistent speed over the world map, regardless of what type of units are in it. You no longer have your whole army slow down because you let a warbreed tag along with your cavalry, and you no longer must take flying mounts with every build in order to stay competitive. As an added bonus, for people who didn’t actively try and optimize move points in their builds, their armies now move a bit faster!
Unit Experience Rework
The experience system in Age of Wonders 4 was based on the same system used in Planetfall, and is a fairly straightforward affair with the player earning XP by killing enemies and having that XP distributed amongst the units that took part in the battle. There were a few wrinkles, mainly designed to prevent a single high powered hero from rocketing up in level by soloing every fight they could, but otherwise it did the job the game needed.
There were still several issues though which meant we felt it was worth having another look at it. One issue was simply that a player who was capable of having a lot of battles would have a huge advantage over one who was not. Obviously some advantage here is expected (it is in fact the whole point of the system!) but the advantage was too big, and meant players were forced to constantly optimize who and how often they fought for maximum XP gain. It also meant that a player who had bad luck, either through a bad auto-combat result, or from the RMG placing units too far apart would fall rapidly behind other players.
Another issue came down to how it felt when you were not earning XP. If an army couldn’t fight, it felt like a waste since it wasn’t gaining XP to become stronger. If a unit was at maximum level, it felt like a waste to actually use it, since it was wasting XP that could be of use to a unit not at maximum level.
The final issue was the XP values in the system were just too small - a tier 1 unit only needed 4xp to reach its first level. Small numbers are easy for players to process and understand, but have a big disadvantage once you start adding modifiers like “gain +20% xp”. Since the xp system only used whole numbers, a 20% bonus would turn a 2 into a 3, which is the same as a 10% bonus or a 50% bonus! This numerical instability led to all sorts of strangeness with players trying to optimize xp gain through combining various bonuses.
Since there are several distinct issues, we ended up having to implement several distinct solutions:
We multiplied all XP values by 10
So if something needed 4xp before, it now needed 40xp. If a unit gave 2xp for being killed, it now gave 20xp. These bigger numbers would work in a much more predictable way when applying bonuses, and meant that the impact of a 10% bonus was much more predictable and balanced.
We gave every unit in the game an XP bonus per turn
This means that every unit in the game earns 10xp every single turn, just for being alive - meaning a tier 1 unit will gain its first medal after 4 turns, even if it does nothing at all. We combined this with halving the amount of XP that units gain from other sources. This means that, if you were to have 9 fights in turns in the new system, your units would level up roughly the same amount as they had done so before. However if you had no fights at all in that same period, you would still level up around half as much.
We also added extra sources of passive XP to a few other places, for example:
Putting a unit in a city with palisade walls gives it an additional 5xp per turn
Putting a unit in a city with stone walls gives it an additional 15xp per turn (this replaces the Palisade Walls bonus)
The Rapid Evolution enchantment (from the Tome of Evolution) gives 15xp per turn to units that can evolve.
The Career Soldiers empire skill gives 10xp per Turn instead of a percentage increase
What this generally meant was that the player felt far less pressure to constantly fight with their units in order to keep them useful, and could in fact invest in ways to level up their units in other ways if they wished!
We brought back the Endless Levels system from Age of Wonders 3
When a unit reaches Legend rank, it can now keep earning xp in order to earn Exalted ranks. Each exalted rank costs as much XP as was needed to get from Champion to Legend rank, and increases the units maximum hp by 10!
While this is a neat feature, and making unkillable tier 1 units is a fun thing to do, we’re aware that this might not be for everyone, so we’ve added the option to disable Endless Levels in the realm setup screen.
Honorable Mentions
As well as the big changes listed above, we’ve made a few other new features we hope you’ll enjoy!
Added a Color Picker to Faction Creation
This means you guys can now pick any color you want for your faction’s banner and appearance! There is a caveat here that this means you can pick colors that make the game harder to play, by setting your banner color to the same colors as an infestation for example, but with great power comes great responsibility!
I am not a very responsible person
Made it easier for cities to annex provinces from other cities
Believe it or not, it was actually already possible for a city to annex provinces from other cities in certain circumstances, however the UI for this was very unclear and many people (myself included) didn’t actually even realize it was possible.
To fix this:
We’ve updated the in game rules for a city to take provinces from vassals, enemy cities and your own cities.
We’ve done a big pass on the UI to make it clearer which provinces a city can take from another.
We’ve updated the economic-view to be more consistent with what improvement pins it displays where
A city can annex provinces from enemy cities, if they’ve been pillaged first.
Conclusion
I hope you’ve enjoyed reading about the changes we made as well as our reasoning behind doing them! These changes will go live on March 9th for all players for free, along with the release of our next DLC - Rise from Ruin!
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