age of wonders 4 - age of cheating

[Sinistar]

if you like classics like civilization it is a fantasy themed realm which obviously copies a lot of source material from tolkien and DnD and so on

lots of combat and unit and city modifiers with spells / structures / improvements race specific traits and so on

 

no game cheats like age of wonders 4 i have seen

 

there is the usual flow where all computer factions always have larger empires and more starting resources upon meeting them early on

there is no strategy the player can follow or copy watching computer factions achieve this position so early on in the game- it is simply the way it is and is very common in these sorts of 4X empire building games in order to present a challenge

 

this game takes cheating to new levels of being a waste of time to even play the game unless the player mitigates these conditions before generating new maps

"easy" settings are difficult

"normal" settings are almost impossible

i do not even bother with 'difficult' since i can virtually see already what that might be with the easier settings

 

the developers have done a good job presenting and tailoring unique story arcs and adventures in each scenario to get around the usual patterns where later turns become boring once the player has all but beaten the game and is basically mopping up around the map

so each scenario has enough variety to keep it interesting

 

this game generates conceits into each scenario which can cripple a player in one turn no matter how powerful or resourceful the player becomes

the game levels up with the player so that paradoxically the longer a player lasts the weaker and more tenuous his position becomes

in previous age of wonders versions surviving the first 50 turns was difficult, by about turn 200 turns the player is probably secure

and about turn 300 the player has all but won and usually the game is drawing down and getting quite boring by this time if the player wishes to see it through to the end

 

the developers have since really figured out how to destabilize every scenario and really screw the player the longer the game goes on:

 

- "suddenly the stars in the constellation such and such have realigned, the universe has turned into catastrophe, ruining all your crops and turned your armies feeble and week" - of course while in the middle of a battle or several battles

 

- even worse and probably the most asinine are the non-aligned NPC factions which the game generates- these units do not necessarily have to build their own cities and mine or farm resources to survive; they simply are leveling up with no need for any of that and tend to roam around the map looking for the player's empire

they tend to beeline for the player from across the map and attack unsecured flanks and rear areas at the most inopportune time- i.e., when the player is already spread thin fighting other factions

in later turns these units are leveling up to legendary status without any reason for it other than to be difficult and are often more powerful than any true faction in a scenario

 

sure it is a challenge but the combination of these things often turn the tables on the player suddenly and nullify the hours and work put into a scenario, weaken the player and flush all that work 

 

 

reasons to play:

great looking environments and units 

players can custom design maps and races and experiment with different combinations of skills and abilities so that players can try to create factions from source material like tolkein or DnD and so on

 

it is never boring in the sense there are long stretches of inactivity- it is the opposite - it is often a game of whack a mole trying to fence off problems which appear like a cancer everywhere in the player's realm

 

reasons not to play:

 

virtually a complete waste of time - why play at all when you are virtually guaranteed to fail after putting in so much time

you have to 'cheat' to survive - let alone win- i.e., saving on every turn and reloading just to stay apace and find ways around these random events

 

i have won only one match out of maybe 40 - 50 attempts so far which is in my view a contrived ratio- it should not be that lopsided

i am well past the learning curve at this point and i completely understand what the developers are doing

the 'challenge' is really to find a way to beat a scenario despite all of the 'cheating' the game does really more than as a test of a player's resourcefulness

 

but if you want a challenge it definitely is that

 

 

Edited July 4, 2025 by Sinistar

[Tim the Tank Nut]

Lackluster game design coupled with poor programming equals bad product.  Developers are supposed to be creating enjoyable content.  These days they have an adversarial relationship with the gamer that consumes the product.

[Ssnake]

Who needs nuance.

[Sinistar]

this game is really a study in compounding

 

build structures or choose skill sets and trees and tweak them based on their compounding effects and work with or against one another

 

even choosing your faction leader- will it be a mortal champion or wizard king or a kind of god

you would think the god and then the wizard king and then the mortal champion in descending order would suggest choosing the god

except that in practice while the god or the wizard king might be individually powerful the compounding and cascading effects a mortal champion's skill sets transfer to armies can make those keep pace with these so called 'gods' and wizard kings

 

in the way way these random universal events which are occurring often

maybe every 5 or 6 turns or so

 

you might weather some of them

 

but they show up and you get the wrong combination active and they start compounding negative effects from the previous random events and suddenly you go from number 1 to losing that quickly

randomly generated maps can also have starting negative modifiers which interact with one another or with game events in the worst way

 

it is is all thoughtful and interesting in theory

 

i do want to like it

the subject matter is fun and you want to ascend and memorialize your custom made factions and leaders into the pantheon where they are memorialized 

but the game sucks your life away to attempt it

 

it is also runs the computer case hot and the fan is running loud the whole game

you can even do an internet search on it to so see other users commenting on that

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited July 6, 2025 by Sinistar

[Tim the Tank Nut]

looking back at the original Master of Orion or Civ or any comparable older game (4X) the games were plenty playable and fun.  I don't think nuance is the issue here.  The issue is that too many current developers want unbeatable games and those aren't fun. 

[Ssnake]

On 7/5/2025 at 6:24 PM, Tim the Tank Nut said:

Developers are supposed to be creating enjoyable content.  These days they have an adversarial relationship with the gamer

Nuance is very much the issue in that your assertion is that this is at least a majority trend across all game developers.

But, sure, convince me I'm wrong and bring meaningful statistics to the table. There's tens of thousands of game devs around, surely you can show that more than half a dozen hand-picked cases from high profile studios exist.

[Ssnake]

18 minutes ago, Tim the Tank Nut said:

too many current developers want unbeatable games and those aren't fun. 

I suppose you exclude all casual games that are supremely playable - so primitive even that there's no meaningful difgiculty in them.

So, maybe let's investigate this from a different angle. Name all the games that you bought or seriously considered buying in the last two years.

Which ones were unbeatable, or had a reputation of being so, and that was the reason why you didn't buy them?

[Tim the Tank Nut]

I find the casual games worse because there is no challenge.  That's the art of making a good game.  Finding the balance between entertainment and challenge is magic when it happens.

more tomorrow... got chores to do but didn't wish to appear rude

[Ssnake]

1 hour ago, Tim the Tank Nut said:

I find the casual games worse because there is no challenge.

No argument from me there. Their whole point is to maximize time wastage so more ads can be played or otherwise money extracted. They must be sufficiently primitive as to not challenge anyone.

[Tim the Tank Nut]

that's where I think gaming went off the rails.  When monetization became part of the game play I checked out.  I can most likely afford any game system or game that I really wanted but I don't have any desire to pay real money to do well in the game.  In the old days games came on floppy disks or CDRom and they were endlessly entertaining.  I OWNED the game.  I had bought it and it was mine.  Look at the game play of Tie Fighter or Betrayal at Krondor or Master of Orion (All early nineties games).  The technical limitations of the hardware forced the designers to be brilliant.  Modern games have no real hardware limitation.  The technical limitations just aren't there any more so designers don't have to try as hard.

When Neverwinter Nights Diamond came out it had gone through a moderately bumpy launch.  The Diamond Edition cleaned most of that up.  Shortly after that Bioware figured out that the development tools meant that they had just created and sold the last game anyone would really need to buy (for DnD type stuff).  It was an "oh shit" moment because those tools were robust enough to create whole games without any additional expenditure.  Needless to say that model doesn't exist any more even if NWN still has a fairly significant online presence.  It didn't lead to more money for the game developer.

I had a series of games that started with Gettysburg and finished with Prelude to Waterloo.  Somebody famous did them but I don't recall who.  They were serious wargames but they straddled the line between technical and fun (at least for me).  Later, as graphics progressed those types of games became more dependent on how they looked rather than how they played.  I'm not the only person who looks to older games for entertainment.  There are plenty of people that comment on the phenomenon.  If something great comes out I will get it but I haven't seen anything that is worth my money AND MY TIME at the same time.

[Ssnake]

I will readily concede all of these points. I took objection to the supposition that (all/a majority of) game developers have an antagonistic attitude towards their customers. I certainly don't, none in my team does as far as I can tell, and I think I can easily point to a number of contemporary games that are neither too hard, nor do they prey on their players or engage in otherwise questionable business ethics. Heck, I would even go so far, looking at everything that's on offer on Steam, that the vast majority of new games still is A-OK by your standards. Some studios have taken wrong turns because of perverted market mechanisms. FEX, the forced LGBTQ letter salad agenda from bigger (=stock exchange listed) game studios' titles is often a direct result of ESG-oriented ETFs.

The sales performance is less important for these investors than the social agenda, to the extent that it can be ticked off with mindless bureaucratic checklists. L? Check. G? Check. T? Check. DEI? Check. etc.; so, as long as they tick off all these boxes, sweet investor money is coming in and they don't have to worry about sales figures. These teams are no longer in the playing games business, they are in the playing the stock market business. So, who's at fault - that game publishers seek a listing at stock exchanges? That well-meaning people invented ESG investment strategies to promote running the economy with less externalization of harmful byproducts? That sociopathic finance guys quickly recognized this as an option to collect money and twist it into something horrid (because, that's what they always do - just look at what Elliott made out of Southwest Airlines).

There's also some game developers that work themselves into a niche together with certain gamer groups. Case 1, flight simulators. They were a staple of mainstream gaming in the 1990s but then some users demanded higher and higher realism which then resulted in a stagnation of the absolute number of customers while the remaining computer game market grew twenty-fold. Case 2, gamers who demand harder challenges until they basically squeeze regular gamers from the dev's customer group. That could be by making games very hard but still fair (Elden Ring might be an example), it could be by losing sight in the development process, or being forced to make shortcuts to meet a release deadline that's usually imposed by marketing or investors with little tolerance for fine-tuning (something that may very well have caused the problems described in this thread's Age of Wonders critique). Maybe, occasionally, laziness is also an explanation. But my impression is that most devs are pretty passionate about their games. You don't work in the computer game industry because it's such a nice place. It can be rather horrid, at times. People go there because they usually like good games and want to make their own.

 

The longer I am in this business the more forgiving I tend to be when judging the quality of other developers. You rarely get to have a peek behind the scenes to understand why certain compromises had to be made (maybe an important guy had a car accident/fell ill, a publisher jumped ship or got a new owner with new priorities). When you assemble several hundred people to make a AAA game within 18...24 months, so many things can go wrong. You had such a nice concept for new game mechanics, but then you discovered halfway in development that a certain thing didn't work (maybe that feature just ate too many CPU cycles). All of a sudden the entire construct no longer works properly, but you have already sunk 75% of all money into the project, and you need to somehow avoid complete disaster.

 

Maybe the 1990s only appear as a golden age of gaming because we have no longer a memory of all the stinkers that were released during those years, but the strongest titles have become timeless classics. Also, since the games were less complex and AAA games could be made by much smaller teams, the overall complexity was much less of an issue.

[seahawk]

Well, I would say the biggest problems are not the developers but marketing and management. My showcase - Battlefield series. When Dice was in control and the games were a work of a dedicated core group with a clear vision, they were great, then EA bought the company and took increasing influence and it went down hill from there.

Game design decisions were wrong, the game abandoned the core user base and tried to win over users from different types of games. Then the political correctness came in and finally they tried to make the game cheap and save on resources. The coming one also looks like a failure with Battle Royal, Single Player, Multiplayer, Season Passes,....

Edited July 9, 2025 by seahawk

[Ssnake]

1 hour ago, seahawk said:

Well, I would say the biggest problems are not the developers but marketing and management.

Spot on; marketing is usually only a problem if management pushes them to. So at the end of the day, it's bad management, and with the big publishers, they are basically just a conduit for the old wisdom that "shit flows downhill". Stock market investor interests do not necessarily align with a company's, let alone their customers' interests (just see how US car manufacturers painted themselves into the SUV corner and basically gave up on making regular cars).

 

The secret sauce is maintaining your independence as a company (idenpendent of the kind of buisness). As soon as your fate as a business is decoupled from customer demand, things often go sideways.

[seahawk]

It is the problem that every management wants to have their own Fortnite, but actually there is hardly room for 2 such games at the same level of success. So copying Fortnite is always going to fail, you need something new and unique. But new and unique is not something that marketing can showcase with user numbers and in-game transactions.

[Ssnake]

One can successfully develop games that aren't just clones, as long as one is willing to abandon the aspiration to be the next Fortnite (and frankly, there is little technological challenge in Fortnite; its success is more of a social phenomenon than anything else, and those are, thankfully, still impossible to engineer).

[Tim the Tank Nut]

Your second paragraph from the reply above should be on the front page of the Wall Street Journal for the next year.

 

As far as the nineties being the golden age of computer gaming I think that it was.  I have a lot of nostalgia for the arc that computer games have taken.  In the case of Tie Fighter Collector's Edition I don't still play it for nostalgia.  I play it because I enjoy it, it's great fun.  Empire (much older) or Gunship (also much older) are more for nostalgia than pure fun but I like them both.  Do you remember Starflight? or M.U.L.E?  I do have a working copy of LucasArts Strike Fleet in a C64 emulator someplace. I bought one of the new Atari 7800+ so I could see the hills in the background on Chopper Command.  As I little kid I just wanted to know what was behind those hills.  Because of my age I sort of got to see what was behind those hills with each technical development.  My gaming apex was Neverwinter Nights on a LAN in my basement with a party of 7.  If you had played some sort of computer rpg ten years earlier the idea of a real DM on computer was astonishing.  It was an expensive thing to do and I don't regret one cent of it.

For my part I don't like the games that become pure simulation as I don't have the time to master them.  As I get older and my eyes get weaker the time in front of a screen at work limits what I can play at home due to eyestrain.  Thusly, play what I know when I can.

I've seen a few Melonie Mac videos and I guess she does a better job of talking about new games being worse than older ones.  She focuses on Tomb Raider a lot so it can get repetitive but it's still pretty much true.  Also, she's not one to shy away from calling a game gay.  In fantasy RPG how do you end up with a trans Dwarf anyway?

[seahawk]

When, if not in Fantasy games, should this be possible. Look at Fallout 4, there is really nothing you can do sexually wise and it is no problem, as the game does not force you to do any of the stuff. (be it male on female, male on male, robots, mutants, ghouls, ...) 

[Tim the Tank Nut]

it strikes me as silly.  To each its own.

[Stuart Galbraith]

17 hours ago, Tim the Tank Nut said:

Your second paragraph from the reply above should be on the front page of the Wall Street Journal for the next year.

 

As far as the nineties being the golden age of computer gaming I think that it was.  I have a lot of nostalgia for the arc that computer games have taken.  In the case of Tie Fighter Collector's Edition I don't still play it for nostalgia.  I play it because I enjoy it, it's great fun.  Empire (much older) or Gunship (also much older) are more for nostalgia than pure fun but I like them both.  Do you remember Starflight? or M.U.L.E?  I do have a working copy of LucasArts Strike Fleet in a C64 emulator someplace. I bought one of the new Atari 7800+ so I could see the hills in the background on Chopper Command.  As I little kid I just wanted to know what was behind those hills.  Because of my age I sort of got to see what was behind those hills with each technical development.  My gaming apex was Neverwinter Nights on a LAN in my basement with a party of 7.  If you had played some sort of computer rpg ten years earlier the idea of a real DM on computer was astonishing.  It was an expensive thing to do and I don't regret one cent of it.

For my part I don't like the games that become pure simulation as I don't have the time to master them.  As I get older and my eyes get weaker the time in front of a screen at work limits what I can play at home due to eyestrain.  Thusly, play what I know when I can.

I've seen a few Melonie Mac videos and I guess she does a better job of talking about new games being worse than older ones.  She focuses on Tomb Raider a lot so it can get repetitive but it's still pretty much true.  Also, she's not one to shy away from calling a game gay.  In fantasy RPG how do you end up with a trans Dwarf anyway?

I personally think it was earlier, the 1980's. The amount you could coax out of 8 bit was extraordinary, and in my view, having less memory and computing power forced gamemakers to be absolutely ruthless. They had to concentrate on what mattered, which was gameplay.

Id argue that many of the Microprose games in the 90's looked better, but played inferior to their 8 bit predecessors, Stealth Fighter most notably. Because everyone was concerned with making stuff look pretty, but less concerned with making it interesting or a challenge. By and large (there were exceptions, like Lemmings or some Amiga games which strongly emulated games of the previous decade) that was true across the decade. The 2000's arguably were even worse, particularly when people invented  pay to play.

The period between 1983 and 1990 was a golden period we wont see again. The amount of spectrum or C64 emulators out there are evidence of that, some of them now increasingly turning into hardware.

[Ssnake]

Rose-tinted glasses; for every really good C64 title there were two dozen Frogger and similar stinkers. Raid over Moscow wasn't exactly a game connaisseur's title.

There were also Elite and MULE, Wizball, and Gunship. Yes. We all remember them. But there were also the myriads of titles that are now rightfully forgotten.

[Stuart Galbraith]

Just now, Ssnake said:

Rose-tinted glasses; for every really good C64 title there were two dozen Frogger and similar stinkers. Raid over Moscow wasn't exactly a game connaisseur's title.

There were also Elite and MULE, Wizball, and Gunship. Yes. We all remember them. But there were also the myriads of titles that are now rightfully forgotten.

Politically correct it wasnt, but it certainly had innovative stuff in it. That which was derivative was largely from their previous staple 'Bridgehead.' And it was arguably more fun to play than several games ive bought in recent years on Steam.

Yes, there was  lots of clones. The point is that for every 5 or 6 clones there was something truly innovative that was the vanguard. I sometimes go and look on archive.org and flick through some of the old magazines from back then (most notably Personal Computer Games) and it was genuinely exciting, groundbreaking stuff being released nearly every month. Now you get something that is hyped for 2 or 3 years, it arrives early, and requires dozens of patches before its playable, if ever. And worst of all, generally they arent fun to play. I spent several years grinding through Elite Dangerous and got myself an Anaconda, theoretically the high point. There was no real sense of achievement, and looking back, not really much fun. Nothing like compared to the early 80's Elite which, my God, was certainly basic looking back.

Even wargaming really hasnt moved on from those times. I look at the recent rise of the  RTS phenomenon with irritation, not least because its wargaming lite. In the 1980's you could play something like Crusade in Europe and take allied forces from Normandy over the Rhine in nauseating detail.  There were various squad based games that were in many ways the forerunner of Xcom and other games like it. Or utterly forgotten games like Pegasus Bridge, which simulated the 6th Airborne Division landings in Normandy, and had a rulebook larger than some Tom Clancy novels. And by God when you finished it, you felt you had actually learned something.

Yes, of course there was quantity, and much of it was bad. But that was true of the Music scene in the 1960's too, and nobody looks back and remembers that. 

[Tim the Tank Nut]

Okay, I think this discussion is great!

Over all the things that make me put earlier games over later games I think I can narrow down my biggest gripes with the new stuff.

Purchasing product in game.  I will not buy/play games that require repeat payment to be competitive

The on-line element.  Sometimes (most times) I just want to immerse in the game world by myself.  The scheduling aspect of online multiplayer isn't practical for me in most cases and too many games are geared towards driving the online experience.  I know a lot of people love that experience but it isn't for me.

Overt political/social messaging (in ANY direction).  I'm gaming to get away from the real world, not be buried by it.

Over reliance on good graphics to make up for bad story and gameplay.  It doesn't need to look like a movie, it needs to be fun and compelling.  In too many cases the graphics are a distraction.  Part of the game experience is to have some imagination involved.

more later, gotta work

[Tim the Tank Nut]

another thing that I am not fond of is building up characters that are going to be killed in game and there's nothing the player can do about it.  In an RPG environment I am not thrilled about getting invested in a character where there is no part of the story arc that allows for survival.  It turns the player into a sucker.  I get the "Red shirts" characters that make a story go but the feeling of wasted time aggravates me.  Lots of folks call it good storytelling but its cheap emotional shots from where I sit.

Which brings me to:

Bad writing in general.  Look at the story that Tie Fighter CD weaved around an entirely action based game.  That's how its done.  Betrayal at Krondor was near novel grade writing.  Granted both games covered established worlds but they did it in Floppy disk and CDROM.

Good writing makes a tremendous difference.

[Ssnake]

Your opinion on Cyberpunk 2077?

[seahawk]

10 hours ago, Ssnake said:

Rose-tinted glasses; for every really good C64 title there were two dozen Frogger and similar stinkers. Raid over Moscow wasn't exactly a game connaisseur's title.

There were also Elite and MULE, Wizball, and Gunship. Yes. We all remember them. But there were also the myriads of titles that are now rightfully forgotten.

Elite was amazing because it was new. Try the same game again and people would call it boring, repetitious and the frustration level unacceptable.