Age of Wonders 4 Review (Astasia)
Legitimately one of the best 4X games, period.
I don't really have any complaints or things to pick apart here, the game just works, is well polished, and well designed.
Base "race" appearance has been made a cosmetic choice, allowing you to play who you want when you want and how you want. A series of trait options, culture options (sort of like class), in game events, and the tomes you research and spells you cast, all fine-tune your "race" into basically exactly what you want. If you like Elves you can play demon elves, angel elves, plant elves, underground elves, metal elves, undead elves, sneaky elves, armored elves, etc. etc. The combinations are basically endless.
The tome system serves as a tech tree in addition to a means to customize your faction's playstyle and appearance. Dozens of tomes each offer a handful of "techs" to research, many of them include unit and city upgrade options in addition to the various types of spells. You are limited in how often you can choose a new tome to unlock, which means the tomes you pick early-mid game very much define how you play that run. If you play long enough, like hundreds of turns, you can eventually unlock almost everything though and make your race into functional gods. You can only pick one tome from the highest tier though, so you can't "master" everything in one run. It's just implemented really well and is a lot of fun.
City management is amazing. Every time a pop grows you city claims a new tile and can pick from like 1-5 base improvements depending on what exists on that tile. At this point it feels a bit like Civ or similar games, each improvement increases specific yields and works more or less how you would expect. However, many core city buildings require a specific number of a certain improvement to be built, many buildings get construction discounts if a specific number of different improvements are present, some buildings boost the yields of certain improvements, this all creates a bit of a balance game to get the yields you want from a city. It gets better though, many tomes unlock a special stronger tile improvement, many of them get bonuses for nearby improvements or terrain, so suddenly a cluster of quarries/farms/whatever all in one area can super charge one of these special improvements, and this creates a lot of questions and planning about where you are going to build things to get the best yields. It's very engaging, it's not something you feel like just turning on auto and ignoring, every time a city grows it's exciting.
Combat is fine, I usually auto battle so I don't really have a judgement here. I have done a few manual combats, it seems to work as well as previous AoW games. Loading into the combat map and then back to the world map is lightning fast at least.
Performance is fine, my PC is somewhere between minimum and recommend (Ryzen 7 1700, GTX 1060 3GB, 16GB RAM), I can't max out the settings without getting some performance issues as expected for a system not meeting recommended specs. However I have most settings on high, with just things like MSAA and SSOA turned off and I don't have any issues, 99% of the time. There's one screen when upgrading units, or customizing them before starting a game, where the units are standing on like this dark platform with a lot of fog, occasionally my FPS dips quite a bit there, not sure why. Never happens during actual gameplay. I had one crash on day one, been fine since.
The campaign, I don't usually play campaigns in these games, but I figured I would give it a try this time as I learned the game. It's not a blockbuster AAA campaign with FMV scenes or anything like that, but it's functional, has a story, lots of dialog, a narrator voices a number of scenes. The important thing is the gameplay is very relevant to actual gameplay, it's not like a serious of pointless mini-games. You start a campaign map and just play normally, with the objective to win. The campaign will give you quests which will generally help you win faster, providing you with various special rewards, and often giving you options on how to do things. The quests all have dialog and explain what's going on and why you are there etc. I'm mostly going over this part because a number of people are complaining there is no campaign, which is false.
Lastly I'll cover the meta progression. Every time you finish a run, whether through winning or losing, you gain "pantheon" exp, and every time that levels up you get a point to spend on like a meta-progression skill tree type thing. This tree unlocks all sorts of things, cosmetics, new map modifiers, new side-story maps, new racial traits, and new starting gear for your leader. If there's one thing you really want on the pantheon tree, you can probably unlock it within a couple decent length games. Unlocking everything, I don't have any real idea how long that will take at this point, possibly 100 hours assuming levels don't get slower later. It looks like you can respec the tree though, so it's not something you "need" to grind through to do things, it just gives you a reason to keep winning instead of walking away from games half way through, and eventually you can fill that whole tree in. I would say, for my taste, there's a few too many cosmetics on there compared to actual gameplay unlocks, but I think some people would prefer no gameplay unlocks at all, so I guess they found a middle ground.
So ya, just an all around amazing game. Highly recommend it to fans of 4X games.